The Book of Wanda, Volume Two of the Seventeen Trilogy Read online

  Dr. Chelsea had already taken two strides toward the exit. “You needn’t worry about the cart,” she said. The door opened on her EI command, and Wanda watched through the transparent wall as Dr. Chelsea went through the security steps to open her own office door.

  “Wanda!” Jeremy’s voice sounded flustered. Desperate, even. Her eyes met his, and her EI, scanning his iris, told her he’d flagged a page for her. She let her EI follow it, opening what turned out to be the page for Amelix Retreat, the reconditioning division.

  “Sign up. Now!” Jeremy said.

  Wanda cleared her throat. This again? Now? “Look, Dr. Synd, I appreciate—”

  “What do you think she’s doing over there?” he said. “You just told her that you have acquired intimate knowledge of a project beyond your clearance.”

  “It was just an accidental observation, sir. You know I did nothing wrong, don’t you, sir?”

  “Your eyes were where they shouldn’t have been. You know that’s classic nonconformist behavior. She’s communicating with someone right now, firing you.” His eyes met hers again. There was no flagged page connected to them this time, just an expression slightly resembling human concern. “Register for voluntary reconditioning right now,” he said. “Making the request means all your mistakes are forgiven. Otherwise she’ll complete the process, and once the Unnamed Executives come for you it will be too late. They’ll disable your EI before you even see them. They’ll grab you, and you’ll be gone.”

  “I …” she said.

  Should she tell him his reaction was crazy?

  It wasn’t entirely crazy. It was how the corporate machinery functioned, and even among the Accepted, Chelsea was certainly a zealot. But that she would be cast out just for this observation was too far-fetched an assertion; Wanda wasn’t about to turn over her brain and become, as her grandmother had said, a machine. As both of these doctors were fond of pointing out, Wanda had sacrificed her career, and even her daughter Nami’s future, to hold onto what little spark of individuality she was still allowed. Uniqueness had brought her endless punishment and torment, but she had struggled on.

  Jeremy thought the threat was real and immediate this time, but he had been pressuring her to surrender herself for reconditioning for years now.

  Maybe he’s right. I’m so tired of fighting it, so tired of being looked down on and held back. Maybe it’s time.

  The thought reverberated through her mind, unwelcome but unsurprising. Succumb to reconditioning. The benefits and virtues of the process had been pounded into her head every day of her life, always delivered with the implication that reconditioning was inevitable in the modern world. Maybe it was.

  No. Nami’s still too young to have her mother disappear into the structure so completely.

  Accepted became more efficient and dedicated to the company, but also cold and often brutal to anyone they deemed a potential drain on corporate resources. Family members were generally the first casualties. Wanda’s grandmother had been her only contact with a genuine, independent personality, and the only source of love that machines could not provide, yet her mother and father had been cruel to the woman because she had never progressed beyond the company’s lowest stations. Wanda had repeatedly incurred her parents’ wrath once they recognized her intention to follow her grandmother’s warm and caring example rather than their own cold and ruthless one. She had chosen a path that not only contradicted the will and expectation of her family, but that of everyone she knew. Even so, Wanda had fought for her individuality, to remain her own person as she knew Grandmother would have wanted, and had been able to be a natural, loving mother to her own daughter. Nami deserved that. For Nami Wanda continued the fight.

  All Accepted had a conditioned compulsion to make their coworkers submit to voluntary reconditioning and become Accepted, themselves. This was obviously what was motivating Jeremy right now, but she couldn’t say that to him.

  “Whatever inexplicable aversion to reconditioning you’ve had, it’s time to lose it, now,” Jeremy said. “You allowed your juvenile pride to derail your career. Fine. But don’t let it cost you your life. You still have a chance to serve Amelix and the Lord.” His voice dropped to a shaky whisper. “Don’t end up Departed.”

  Wanda felt the familiar chill that overcame anyone in the corporate class at the mention of the Departed. It was a topic of hushed conversations between CBD workers intoxicated enough to broach the most taboo of subjects. The Horde of the Departed was the setting of nightmares, where former corporates huddled together and slowly succumbed to starvation and disease in the city’s sprawling, hyper-violent ghetto, the Zone. It was almost certainly where her grandmother had ended up, probably because she’d brought the rats home for Wanda.

  “Thank you, sir, for your concern,” Wanda said. “But Dr. Chelsea understands that I’m valuable here and that I had no intention to go beyond my job duties or my clearance. She wouldn’t react so strongly to a simple report, made out of a sense of duty to the company.”

  Jeremy closed his eyes for a moment, but his eyeballs darted around under the lids. “There is no time to discuss this. No time to convince you and I can see your heart is still closed to the truth.” He opened his eyes again and her EI followed a new link to another page: a list of names. Roger Terry was one of the names. Alma Traxler, Wanda’s grandmother, was another. On the list of maybe three hundred she recognized three others, all people who had Departed during her time with the department. A closer inspection would probably show a few more she had known, but she shut the page again.

  “Store that,” he said. “They won’t permanently disable your EI, just cut you off from everything inside the building here. That list I gave you is of people who Departed from here. If you can find any of them, maybe they’ll be able to help you somehow.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Synd. I know you gave me the list out of concern for me and I truly appreciate that you care. But I just cannot bring myself to believe that the things you’re warning me about will actually come to pass.” Through her own EI she searched greeting cards, finding one with a pink cartoon rabbit with one ear flopped down, reading, “Thank you.”

  She was halfway through her command to flag it for him when the site vanished from her mind. She tried to recall it and discovered it wasn’t available. Links, communications, codes, and everything else were all gone. Her EI had been disabled.

  Zone IA1.12

  Len Jurphy’s last meal had been two days ago, a bowl of synthesized goo intentionally left bland because prisoners didn’t deserve patented flavorings. There were only two meals after a conviction, anyway: one as intake orders were processed, and one, like Len’s two days ago, upon release. Len’s intake into the penal Brain Trust had been months earlier. In between he’d been unconscious and fed only with minimal intravenous supplements, connected to the Federal computers that kept his brain processing government data for the duration of his sentence, like the thousands of other offenders all around him. Such was punishment on this depleted, dying planet of seventeen billion people.

  Len lay sprawled, weak and wasted, on the concrete outside a club called Babygirl in the Zone’s entertainment area, his body weight half what it had been before his sentencing. His metallic tattoos, once menacing decoration on the taut skin of a strong and dangerous ghetto male, now sagged and hung awkwardly from his skeletal limbs and torso.

  There was no possibility of work. He’d never again be considered for the manual labor jobs he’d gotten when his arms had been triple their current size. Begging had proved futile. While Zone people might be sympathetic, might understand how a decent guy could end up with a larceny conviction and find himself on a slab, Zone people had no money to give. Golden salarymen from the Central Business District had money, but to them Len’s emaciated frame meant that he could be nothing but a criminal, an obvious menace to society, undeserving of their charity. Two days as a beggar had led only to Len being constantly chased off the street by abusive bouncers
. His only donation had been a dirty linen napkin some drunken rich guy had carried off from a restaurant by mistake.

  Len’s landlord had evicted him halfway through his sentence, selling off everything inside his decrepit room to pay back rent. Aside from his buttonless pants and a shredding t-shirt, the napkin was his only possession. He had tucked it across his chest under the shirt to keep warm, and he liked to imagine it made him look just a bit bigger.

  There was motion off to his side. Someone was coming at him.

  “… think you’re doin’ here, slabbie? Huh?”

  Another bouncer. They always came whenever he sat down. The giant hand grabbed Len at the chest and made a fist, lifting him off the ground and throwing him farther down the sidewalk. Len’s shirt disintegrated in the air and the napkin fluttered to the ground as he hit hard, brittle bones sliding under loose, shredding skin across the gravel. The bouncer approached, checking the distance to the edge of the building to judge whether he’d thrown Len far enough. He gave Len a threatening look and picked up the napkin, stuffing it into his back pocket as he returned to the club.

  Federal Administration Building

  Federal Agent Daiss leaned forward in his seat, watching Instructor Samuelson write with a finger over a map of the Zone that appeared to be projected against one wall. In truth, the wall was blank and the map was projected only in the Agents’ minds, as were Samuelson’s diagrams that appeared as glowing lines, all via an application that worked through their EIs.

  “Two years ago,” Samuelson said, drawing a small green circle around maybe fifteen blocks, “this was the area known as Fiend territory. The label was misleading. Really, it was simply a part of town nobody but Fiends would want to go, or for that matter, could survive in at all. And this,” he said, drawing a circle around an area nearly ten times larger, “is Fiend territory today. It is no longer a misleading name. Nearly all Fiends are now organized within a real army called the New Union, which holds and patrols the area as a military force.”

  The map disappeared. It was replaced with an image of a man with a close-cropped beard walking alongside a building that had been blasted to bits. “Top Dog, he calls himself. Be sure to note that while he appears to be walking alone, there are four others in the picture with him.”

  Daiss squinted. It was a habit he couldn’t break even though he was aware that the image wasn’t entering through his eyes. This was far from his first briefing on the Fiend threat, and he had encountered them in person on a few occasions; by now he should be able to spot them all immediately, especially in a picture taken with Zeta’s best tech. He found one, crouched behind some rubble in front and to the left of Top Dog, but only by noticing the rifle barrel poking up above the debris. Without that clue, it was almost impossible to distinguish the actual Fiend.

  “For those who haven’t yet mastered how to pick them out without resorting to IR and UV scans, the other four are here, here, here, and here,” Samuelson said. He drew circles, first around the Fiend Daiss had found, then around a shadow at the edge of the building, and another around what Daiss could now make out as the eyes and hat and plastic-wrapped rifle of one otherwise submerged in a mud puddle. Finally he circled an indistinct, shadowy form protruding just above the roofline. Samuelson overlaid the picture with an EI enhancement using infrared and ultraviolet spectra, and the Fiends came clearly into view.

  Fiends were hard to see and harder to hit, and every encounter with them had proven that they were getting stronger all the time. Daiss personally had seen one Federal Agent killed and three others seriously wounded in clashes with Fiends, yet no strike had yet been ordered to eliminate the threat.

  “Top Dog took them over, kept them from fighting amongst themselves, and turned all the Fiends’ desperation and rage outward, calling his army the New Union,” Samuelson added. “At first they merely continued their small-time operations in the Zone, robbing, kidnapping, and killing, but then they expanded their operations to include raids in the suburbs. This brought them corporate attention, which, as you know, led to the establishment and funding of Task Force Zeta.

  “The New Union publicly claims just over five thousand soldiers, which it calls Elements, but that claim is significantly lower than the actual number,” Samuelson continued. “It is imperative that our official estimates remain consistent with their claims for now, but equally important for us within Zeta to know exactly what we’re dealing with. We want the public to equate the suburban damage so far with just the five thousand Fiends he acknowledges. When the actual numbers are released as startling new statistics showing dramatic growth, the politicos will demand that Zeta get anything it wants. What we’ve pieced together from satellite footage and the Zone’s remaining cameras puts the actual number of New Union Elements somewhere in the range of twenty-five thousand.”

  Zetas knew this already, though Daiss supposed there might be new brothers and sisters attending today who hadn’t heard it before. He had first learned of Top Dog’s deception and actual strength in a meeting just like this, himself.

  “Every New Union Element we’ve interrogated has claimed they had around five thousand total, and that’s clearly intentional,” Samuelson continued. “They don’t believe the number, but every last one vehemently insists on it. There are several reasons Top Dog might be trying to mislead us as to his army’s numbers. For example, Fiends outside the New Union are quite wild, typically running in small gangs of around ten to forty, and could well be put off or intimidated by the idea of such a large organization. It may be easier for him to recruit and retain soldiers when he tells them it’s a smaller group. But we think the main reason is that he knows the New Union’s actual size warrants Federal attention. At this time we are primarily observing without engaging. This will remain true for the near future, not only to keep Top Dog in the dark as to what we know, but also for the strategic reasons I mentioned a moment ago.”

  The map appeared again. Samuelson drew a star on a square standing for one of the buildings. “This structure here currently serves as New Union headquarters,” Samuelson said. “Top Dog is usually somewhere in this building, and about a quarter of his forces stay in close proximity, in these buildings.” He circled each one, resulting in a “T” shape with the star at the intersection of the two lines of circles. “The rest of them are out churning around in the wasteland, accumulating resources and fighters. If left unchecked, Top Dog will completely take over the thirty-three hundred square kilometers known as the Zone within the year.”

  Italy, 73 BC

  Centurion Septimus Furius curled his lip in disgust, but the legionary in front of him kept talking.

  “Decimation is not intended for this purpose! It’s supposed to punish legions with deserters and legionaries who refuse to fight. Crassus commands that we ten percent die today at the hands of our own brothers at arms, simply because the battle was lost. He’s culling soldiers so he doesn’t have to feed so many! Where’s the honor in dying for that? We can run!” he shouted, turning to address the men around them. “We can still escape if we go now. We need not die just because of this madman’s order!”

  Crassus was the wealthiest man in Rome, which meant he was the wealthiest man in the world. When the rebel Spartacus and his army of escaped slaves and gladiators had become a threat to the Roman Republic, Crassus had used his own funds to build this army and fight them, becoming praetor and absolute ruler over all soldiers comprising it. His cruelty and brutality were legendary, but that was what Rome needed to defeat such a threat to the social order.

  “We certainly must die because of this order, Legionary,” Furius said. “Our lots were drawn. Crassus is our general, our praetor, even, and we swore the sacramentum, making us instruments of his will. Remember all those raids? The people we slaughtered? The sacramentum meant Crassus was responsible for all that, not us. The blood stained him, alone, because our obedience is absolute. This is no different, and you disgrace us all by pretending otherwise. Decima
tion may be a shameful death for a soldier, but it’s still a soldier’s death. Abandon the sacramentum and you’re just filth. They should crucify the likes of you, to make a proper example.” Furius turned away, pushing to the front of the livestock pen where they were being kept. He straightened his spine, stepping up to face his soldier’s death, and took off his armor before wading out among the men with whom he’d campaigned all these years.

  A fist split his lip. A bronze forearm brace smashed his collarbone. A kick to his lower back nearly took him to his knees, but he struggled to stand. It was the last fight of his life, after all; why go down easy? A few blows to the gut doubled him over. Another kick took out his knee, and he went down hard. Then feet were everywhere, smashing his face, his spine, his groin. They found his head and began stomping repeatedly, and Centurion Septimus Furius ceased to be.

  Amelix Company Housing

  Wanda sat at the only table in their tiny corporate housing unit, stroking Nami’s hair. The table folded away to provide sleep space, but neither of them would ever sleep here again. Nami would soon be off with her father, and tomorrow a new family would be living here. Tears cascaded down Wanda’s cheeks and soaked the front of her Corporate Green uniform. She felt a bit hurt that her daughter hadn’t cried. But no eight-year-old has the capacity to understand all this, Wanda reasoned, and it was nice that they could share the last of their time together without hysterics. It would make for a better memory.

  She realized now that this terrible, wrenching pain was the other side of natural life, balancing the strength and comfort of real love. Insulated by the system and their beliefs, Accepted never had to hurt like this.