Cause and effect. Is the universe deterministic or not? If everything inevitably follows what came before, tickety-tock, like gigantic, all-inclusive clockwork, then there is no hope. The refugees came from a future that cannot be turned away. If, on the other hand, time is quanticized and uncertain, unstable at every point, constantly prepared to collapse in any direction in response to totally random influences, then all that suffering that came pouring in on us over the course of six long and rainy months might be nothing more than a phantom. Just an artifact of a rejected future.
Our future might be downright pleasant.
We had a million scientists working in every possible discipline, trying to make it so. Biologists, chaoticists, physicists of every shape and description. Fabulously dedicated people. Driven. Motivated. All trying to hold out a hand before what must be and say "Stop!"
How they’d love to get their mitts on what I had stowed in my desk.
I hadn’t decided yet whether I was going to hand it over, though. I wasn’t at all sure what was the right thing to do. Or the smart thing, for that matter.
Gevorkian questioned me on Tuesday. Thursday, I came into my office to discover three UN soldiers with hand-held detectors, running a search.
I shifted my purse back on my shoulder to make me look more strack, and said, "What the hell is going on here?"
"Random check, ma’am." A dark-eyed Indian soldier young enough to be if not my son then my little brother politely touched fingers to forehead in a kind of salute. "For up-time contraband." A sewn tag over one pocket proclaimed his name to be PATHAK. "It is purely standard, I assure you."
I counted the stripes on his arm, compared them to my civilian GS-rating and determined that by the convoluted UN protocols under which we operated, I outranked him.
"Sergeant-Major Pathak. You and I both know that all foreign nationals operate on American soil under sufferance, and the strict understanding that you have no authority whatsoever over native civilians."
"Oh, but this was cleared with your Mr.–"
"I don’t give a good goddamn if you cleared it with the fucking Dalai Lama! This is my office–your authority ends at the door. You have no more right to be here than I have to finger-search your goddamn rectum. Do you follow me?"
He flushed angrily, but said nothing.
All the while, his fellows were running their detectors over the file cabinet, the storage closets, my desk. Little lights on each flashed red red red. Negative negative negative. The soldiers kept their eyes averted from me. Pretending they couldn’t hear a word.
I reamed their sergeant-major out but good. Then, when the office had been thoroughly scanned and the two noncoms were standing about uneasily, wondering how long they’d be kept here, I dismissed the lot. They were all three so grateful to get away from me that nobody asked to examine my purse. Which was, of course, where I had the device.
After they left, I thought about young Sergeant-Major Pathak. I wondered what he would have done if I’d put my hand on his crotch and made a crude suggestion. No, make that an order. He looked to be a real straight arrow. He’d squirm for sure. It was an alarmingly pleasant fantasy.
I thought it through several times in detail, all the while holding the gizmo in my lap and stroking it like a cat.
The next morning, there was an incident at Food Processing. One of the women started screaming when they tried to inject a microminiaturized identi-chip under the skin of her forehead. It was a new system they’d come up with that was supposed to save a per-unit of thirteen cents a week in tracking costs. You walked through a smart doorway, it registered your presence, you picked up your food, and a second doorway checked you off on the way out. There was nothing in it to get upset about.
But the woman began screaming and crying and–this happened right by the kitchens–snatched up a cooking knife and began stabbing herself, over and over. She managed to make nine whacking big holes in herself before the thing was wrestled away from her. The orderlies took her to Intensive, where the doctors said it would be a close thing either way.
After word of that got around, none of the refugees would allow themselves to be identi-chipped. Which really pissed off the UN peacekeepers assigned to the camp, because earlier a couple hundred vics had accepted the chips without so much as a murmur. The Indian troops thought the refugees were willfully trying to make their job more difficult. There were complaints of racism, and rumors of planned retaliation.
I spent the morning doing my bit to calm down things down–hopeless–and the afternoon writing up reports that everyone upstream wanted to receive ASAP and would probably file without reading. So I didn’t have time to think about the device at all.
But I did. Constantly.
It was getting to be a burden.
For health class, one year in high school, I was given a ten-pound sack of flour, which I had to name and then carry around for a month, as if it were a baby. Bippy couldn’t be left unattended; I had to carry it everywhere or else find somebody willing to baby-sit it. The exercise was supposed to teach us responsibility and scare us off of sex. The first thing I did when the month was over was to steal my father’s .45, put Bippy in the backyard, and empty the clip into it, shot after shot. Until all that was left of the little bastard was a cloud of white dust.
The machine from the future was like that. Just another bippy. I had it, and dared not get rid of it. It was obviously valuable. It was equally obviously dangerous. Did I really want the government to get hold of something that could compel people to act against their own wishes? Did I honestly trust them not to immediately turn themselves into everything that we were supposedly fighting to prevent?
I’d been asking myself the same questions for–what?–four days. I’d thought I’d have some answers by now.
I took the bippy out from my purse. It felt cool and smooth in my hand, like melting ice. No, warm. It felt both warm and cool. I ran my hand over and over it, for the comfort of the thing.
After a minute, I got up, zipped shut the flap to my office, and secured it with a twist tie. Then I went back to my desk, sat down, and unbuttoned my blouse. I rubbed the bippy all over my body: up my neck, and over my breasts and around and around on my belly. I kicked off my shoes and clumsily shucked off my pantyhose. Down along the outside of my calves it went, and up the insides of my thighs. Between my legs. It made me feel filthy. It made me feel a little less like killing myself.
How it happened was, I got lost. How I got lost was, I went into the camp after dark.
Nobody goes into the camp after dark, unless they have to. Not even the Indian troops. That’s when the refugees hold their entertainments. They had no compassion for each other, you see–that was our dirty little secret. I saw a toddler fall into a campfire once. There were vics all around, but if it hadn’t been for me, the child would have died. I snatched it from the flames before it got too badly hurt, but nobody else made a move to help it. They just stood there looking. And laughing.