“What happened to Williams … ?” I asked absentmindedly.
“Killed in action, sir. According to a wireless transmission intercepted by an NSA team, sir.”
I was overcome by a fatigue that seemed to penetrate every last nook and cranny of my body. I felt like a lump of wax. As soon as I climbed into the Jeep and sat down I was assaulted by drowsiness. Williams, Lucia, John Paul. All were now distant, half-forgotten memories. The emotions that I thought I had felt and the insight that I thought I had gained—all seemed so unreal now. It was as if I could only remember the whole journey in a series of blurry low-resolution snapshots.
“Let’s get out of here.”
The Jeep started rolling. Moving gently toward the white horizon in the distance. For a moment I imagined that this Tanzanian savanna was the only place in the world that was real, that it stretched across the whole world, and that the Prague and the Paris and the Washington and the Georgetown that I knew were all just a bad dream—a nightmare called civilization.
Somewhere behind us in the vast savanna was John Paul’s final resting place. There his corpse would decay gently under the African sun. His sun-bleached body would be preserved for some time to come, and in this respect he was just like Mom, whom I’d had embalmed so that she would never rot away. John Paul, though, would eventually be able to return to the soil. Maybe the thought of that would have made him happy.
This is my story. That’s what I’m going to say once I’ve finished it.
I left the Forces. There was no one alive left to stop me. After returning from that last mission in Africa I felt that something inside me was missing. It took me a while to realize this for myself, and in the meantime many of my colleagues suggested various forms of counseling.
I brushed all the well-meaning suggestions aside. After my return to America I found that people were speaking in ways I found too fast and slippery. I found myself unable to fully participate in conversations. It was too difficult to join in, so I just stopped speaking to people.
One day, while I was holed up hermitlike in my house, doing nothing, I received an ID and a password in the post.
The envelope was embossed with an expensive-looking InfoSec company logo. It was the company my mother had subscribed to.
The envelope was addressed to me.
The sealed letter explained that, per the terms of the Fourth Amendment to the Personal Information Protection Law, when a person dies intestate and without specific instructions for the disposal of their subscription information assets, all accounts are embargoed for three years, and then all of the intestate party’s accounts are passed onto their next of kin as designated at the time of the opening of the account. As such, and the embargo now having passed, I was now the official owner of the information account of one Ms. Elyssia Shepherd (deceased).
In this society of ours, where everything is recorded and stored for posterity, you occasionally encounter this sort of blast from the past. It was a bit like being in a traffic accident—it’s not exactly a rare occurrence, but no one expects it to happen to them. I was no exception.
I didn’t believe that there would be anything my mother would have particularly wanted to share with me though. I was her next of kin by default; my father had already departed this world when she set up the account, and so I, her son and only child, was the default choice.
The sealed letter provided me with two potential pitfalls.
The first was my mother’s memories in and of themselves.
The second was the fact that, when I had to choose between my mother living or dying, I never put in a request to consult the memories.
When it had been medically determined that my mother was in a no man’s land between life and death and in a place that no living person would ever hope to experience or imagine, I could have put in an official request to the InfoSec company for permission to read her Life Graph. Both the law and the InfoSec company were able to grant special dispensation for a concerned third party to do so when the subscriber was unconscious or medically incapacitated.
I never put in the request. I just chose for my mother to die without reading her Life Graph.
I wonder why I had been afraid of reading my mother’s memories back then? I can’t remember exactly why anymore. All I remember is that I was vaguely frightened and that I didn’t want to.
What about now? Was I still afraid? I probably was. After experiencing the deaths of Lucia Sukrova and John Paul, however, it was now a different type of fear.
The afternoon after the letter arrived was terrifyingly silent. I felt that people were watching over me to see if I would use the account to read my mother’s online memories. When I say people I meant the dead, of course.
After fifteen minutes of hesitation, I accessed my mother’s account and commanded the Life Graph to compile her biography for me.
John Paul had passed me a notebook back in the jungle. I flicked through it to skim its contents, but it was full of obscure academic jargon too difficult for me to understand.
But there was one thing in the notebook that was to prove useful later on. The user name and password of an email account.
An interesting development was that the press somehow found out the true reason for the former senate majority leader’s abrupt withdrawal from public life. I never discovered where the leak came from. An investigative committee was formed and Congressional hearings were held. Even as the whole affair was dragged out into the media, the former senator seemed unrepentant. He made a bold declaration—that we in the US of A always needed the spectacle of war. At any given time, we needed a war to be happening somewhere in the world. And above all, we needed the tragedy of war to be happening somewhere else, in some place where it couldn’t affect us directly. He explained that he had come to this realization some time ago, and that only by being a witness to these sorts of wars could people truly self-actualize and become aware of the potential of their own selves.
This wasn’t the old-fashioned theory that all people in a country needed a common enemy so that they could pull together as a unified nation. No. It was about wars happening overseas, somewhere, vaguely, and being able to pick up on the rustles and murmurs, like background music in a shopping mall. That was what we needed for the twenty-first century, the former senator explained. And John Paul had been the man for the job—he had been able to ensure a steady supply of war.
As a former member of the Special Forces, and as a former member of an elite top-secret assassination unit that performed the government’s dirty work, I was given a huge amount of face time at his hearing and given ample opportunity to tell my stories again and again, just the way I wanted to. Because of my revelations, Washington was plunged into the greatest scandal yet of the twenty-first century, possibly one of the biggest of all time. Of course, my actions violated the State Secrets Protection Act, which was why it came to pass that the US Armed Forces Intelligence Captain Clavis Shepherd was indicted.
In the end, though, the long arm of the law never did get around to dealing with me. There was rioting across the nation by that stage, and the powers that be found that they had far bigger fish to fry. Various state National Guards found themselves opening fire on ordinary citizens, and in turn their armories were being swept away by insurgents who were arming themselves to the teeth to fight back.
Finally, I settled down to read the Life Graph, under the beady eyes of my ever-vigilant spectral companions.