Suddenly, four lines of glowing text appear at the bottom of my visual field:
[Backroom Worker:
Natural memory association.
Casey, Joseph Patrick.
Head of Security as of 12th June, 2066.]
I’d forgotten that I’d asked for staff records, too—or I would have excluded them. I think about waiting for the music to finish, but there’s no point; I know full well that I’d be unable to enjoy it. I hit the stop button, and one more unique incarnation of ‘Paradise’ disappears forever.
Casey is five years older than me, so his retirement, shortly after mine, was not so premature. He’s sitting in a corner of the crowded bar, drinking beer, and I join him in the ritual. I suppose it’s a strange way to pass the time, when not a microgram of ethanol will make it into either of our bloodstreams—while mods compute our consumption and deliver a purely neural buzz in lieu of the (insanely toxic) real thing—but then, if this cultural fossil lasted a thousand years and endured beyond all memory of its origins, it would hardly be unique in doing so.
‘We never see you, Nick. Where have you been hiding?’
We? It takes me a moment to register that he means, not himself and his absent wife, but the bar full of cops and ex-cops; the ‘law-enforcement community’, as the politicians would say—the way they used to talk about the Chinese or Italian or Greek community—as if the neural and physical modifications we share made us into some kind of homogeneous demographic target. I glance around the room and find, mercifully, that I recognize almost nobody.
‘You know how it is.’
‘Business is good?’
‘I’m making a living. You were with RehabCorp, last I heard. What happened?’
‘IS bought them out.’
‘Yeah, I remember that. Lots of retrenchments.’
‘I was lucky. I had connections, I got myself moved sideways. There were people who’d been with RehabCorp for thirty years who got dumped.’
‘So what’s it like at the Hilgemann?’
He laughs. ‘What do you think? Anyone who ends up in a place like that—anyone they can’t fix with a mod, these days—has to be a complete fucking zombie. Security is not a problem.’
‘No? What about Laura Andrews?’
‘You’re in on that?’ He’s no more surprised than politeness requires; Cheng would have had him clear me, before she even returned my call.
‘Yeah.’
‘Who for?’
‘Who do you think?’
‘Fucked if I know. Not for the sister; Winters is working for the sister. Mind you, Winters’ job isn’t finding Laura Andrews; her job is to make me look like shit. That bitch is probably spending all her time sitting at a computer somewhere, fabricating evidence.’
‘Probably.’ Not for the sister. Who, then? A relative of another patient? Someone who believes they’d be shelling out ransom money right now, if the kidnapping hadn’t been botched—and who wants to make sure that there isn’t a second, successful attempt?
‘The case is a joke, you know. We weren’t negligent. Remember that guy who sued the owners of the Sydney Hilton when his daughter got kidnapped from one of their rooms? He was pulverized. The same thing will happen here.’
‘Maybe.’
He laughs sourly. ‘You don’t give a shit either way, do you?’
‘No. And neither should you. IS won’t sack you, even if they lose the case. They’re not idiots; they allocate a certain budget for security, enough to keep the patients in. If they wanted some kind of fortress, they know they’d have to pay for it. They’ve been running prisons long enough to understand the costs.’
He hesitates, then says, ‘“Enough to keep the patients in?” Yeah? Laura Andrews got out twice before.’ He glares at me. ‘And if that ever reaches the sister, I’ll break your fucking neck.’
I stare at him, grinning sceptically, waiting for the joke to be made clear. He just stares back glumly. I say, ‘What do you mean, she “got out”? How?’
How? Shit! I don’t know how. If I knew how, then she wouldn’t have been allowed to do it again, would she?’
‘But… I thought she couldn’t even turn a door handle.’
‘That’s what the doctors say. Well, nobody’s seen her turn a fucking door handle. Nobody’s seen her do anything smart enough to shame a cockroach. But anyone who can get past locked doors, and cameras, and movement sensors, three times, isn’t what she appears to be, is she?’
I snort. ‘What are you getting at? You think she’s been shamming total imbecility for more than thirty years? She never even learnt to speak! You think she started faking brain damage when she was twelve months old?’
He shrugs. ‘Who knows about thirty years ago? The records say one thing, but I wasn’t there. All I know is what she’s done in the last eighteen months. How would you explain it?’
‘Maybe she’s an idiote savante. Or an idiot escapologist.’ Casey rolls his eyes. ‘Okay. I have no idea. But… what happened? The first two times? How far did she get?’
‘Into the grounds, the first time. A couple of kilometres away, the second. We found her in the morning, just wandering about, with the same bland dumb innocent expression on her face as always. I wanted to put a camera inside her room, but the Hilgemann wasn’t having that—some UN convention on the Rights of the Mentally III. IS got enough flak over that Texan prison thing that they’re ultra-careful now.’ He laughs. ‘And how could I argue that I needed more hardware? The patients are vegetables. The rooms have one door and one window; both are monitored twenty-four hours—how could I justify anything more? I mean, I couldn’t say to the fucking Director, “If you’re such a genius, you tell me how she does it. You tell me how to stop her.”’
I shake my head. ‘She didn’t do any of this. She can’t have. Somebody took her. All three times.’
‘Yeah? Who? Why? What do you call the first two times—dry runs?’
I hesitate. ‘Disinformation? Someone trying to convince you that she could break out on her own, so that when they finally took her, you’d think—’ Casey is miming severe incredulity, verging on physical pain. I say, ‘Okay. It sounds like a load of crap to me, too. But I can’t believe she just walked out of there, alone.’
It takes me forever to get to sleep. Boss (Human Dignity, $999) may have rendered it a matter of conscious choice, but somehow I still manage to be an insomniac; I always have some reason to delay the decision, I always have some problem I want to think through—as if every last nagging question which once might have kept me awake had to be dealt with in the old way, regardless.
Or maybe I’m just developing what they call Zeno’s Lethargy. Now that so many aspects of life are subject to nothing but choice, people’s brains are seizing up. Now that there’s so much to be had, literally merely by wanting it, people are building new layers into their thought processes, to protect them from all this power and freedom; near-endless regressions of wanting to decide to want to decide to want to decide what the fuck it is they really do want.