“Sorry! I am sorry!” It was their safe word and immediately the whipping stopped.
She had only once ever used the safe word before and that was when she was still a novice. Just as she slipped into unconsciousness again she heard Sunita’s footsteps receding down the hall and the sound of the corbacho being dropped onto a side table.
Later she woke but kept her eyes shut without moving a muscle. She felt no pain. The room was silent except for the slow tick-tock of the Grandfather clock in their sleeping room. She kept her eyes shut and tested her senses, reaching out with her mind. She found Sunita looking down at her, sitting cross-legged on their large sleeper. She deliberately let out a sigh, her presence miniscule, indistinct in Sunita’s mind. The sigh a signal, Sunita laid a hand on Cochran’s cheek and brushed the angular bone that lay there upwards to the hair she had styled just that morning. Cochran sensed the pressure of the regen bag.
She tested her own mind. She was purged of her guilt. Tomorrow, with new and perfect skin, was a new day, a new beginning. She reached out with her hand and took Sunita’s lying between her crossed legs.
“Thank you,” she whispered, and lightly squeezed the hand she held, never opening her eyes as she slipped into the drugged sleep of deep regen.
Chapter 25
Jonah and Mariko’s Beach House, Sisik Beach, Malaysian Geographic
Friday 3 January 2110, 7:04am +8 UTC
Being able to watch a sunrise every day is a luxury. I waited in the dark, standing on the deck. Still hurting, but feeling good from the morning’s run. Ten kiloms of punishment, the last kilom run in the soft sand.
“Build those legs,” Mariko had shouted, jogging backwards in front me. Looking out to sea my legs still felt wobbly and my hand shook as I drank my first cup of coffee for the day.
Mariko had left for New Singapore an hour ago, carrying her newly acquired bicycle over her shoulder and walking up the beach to Abdul’s restaurant, where the dirt road joined the beach. From there she rode the fourteen kiloms to Kuantan. Once at Changi she took a Lev up to Topside and biked the remaining sixteen kiloms to UNPOL headquarters.
We had spent the first day of the year reading and discussing Gabriel’s information that I had unlocked on my Devstick while offline. When we’d returned to the beach house, the first thing she had done was to go to the kitchen on the ground floor and bring the heat pad up to the second floor. She placed it on a table, and then my folded-out Devstick on another table below it. The twin screens of the Devstick, the keypad and touchpad were all under the heat pad. Mariko explained that this way, infrared sat imaging could not be used — the movements of my hands and the Devscreen would be shielded by the heat signature from the pad.
Yesterday, after my run and after Mariko had left, I had sat down at the unfolded Devstick and started to plan. The root of any good plan is the outcome that you desire. I listed the outcomes I wanted:
— stop the Tag Law
— expose the existence of the Hawks and if possible their members
— Justice for my parents, Gabriel and me. Or failing that
— get rid of Sir Thomas
— survive!
It was a daunting list and I procrastinated in the task of forming plans, thinking instead pointless speculation about who I was. At least I had a name for myself. Mark Anthony Zumar. The problem was that I knew nothing about him. But if now wasn’t the time to spend thinking about that, it did cause me to think of something else.
Why hadn’t my DNA matched Gabriel’s? It was obvious to me that a DNA search would have been made on Gabriel, and it was obvious to me that we were related, but if we were related as closely as he said we were, then our DNA would have been matched. But it hadn’t been. I was reasonably sure that if a search was done on my DNA, it would bear a closer resemblance to Sir Thomas’s DNA than Gabriel’s. Sir Thomas had fabricated a story around me and had substantiated those first lies with evidence in the online system. My fake DNA, no doubt, was planted along with my fake birth date, thirty-four years ago on the 29th of October, 2075. Gabriel had said that I was born on the 23rd of September 2075 but Sir Thomas had changed that to the 29th of October, and there were the fake medical records showing my birth at the Glasgow Memorial Hospital.
He had planned carefully. So must I. The best plans provide an action related to an issue. The action may well be a tactic to enable the next stage of the plan, or it might be an action that was the entire plan. With the Tag Law I realized an immediate problem. If I suddenly started researching privacy laws, UNPOL or whoever was watching me would get suspicious. So either I had to find a way to do the research without causing suspicion, or I needed an accomplice. I dismissed the idea of finding someone to help immediately as too messy, with too many dynamics involved. It would be simpler to find a way to investigate the Tag Law without it being suspicious.
Exposing the Hawks and their members was a much more difficult task. To expose them meant getting in, and even then with their insular behavior, it would be possible to expose only a few. Gabriel had described them as a tree. Roots, branches and leaves. From the original twelve heads, Gabriel had put together a list. Seven identified and eighteen maybes, all people who attended that first meeting. It is from them that the Hawks had grown. Over two hundred years of growth from twelve different roots. How many people is that? Assuming that the first twelve each had two children, and assuming that each of those children had two children — with thirty years between the generations — that was over fifteen hundred people. Allowing for deaths the number of Hawks could be anywhere from one thousand to three thousand.
Gabriel had used Sir Thomas as the basis for analysis of the founding members tracing back from Francis Oliver, Sir Thomas’s father and through him to identify the first Hawks, or at least some them — the rest were conjecture based on their actions. The more I thought about this, the more impossible I realized it was to actually stop or identify them. If something is impossible don’t try do it. The next best thing to stopping them was exposure. To make people aware of their existence and how they acted. This was not easy because there are always conspiracy theories, and theorists usually end up in the ‘crackpot’ category in most people’s minds. For exposure to work, the evidence would have to be concrete and compelling.
Next to — expose the existence of the Hawks and if possible their members I wrote exposure — get concrete compelling evidence. I ignored the last three things on my planning list. As much as I wanted to see a positive outcome for each of them, they were of secondary importance. Six point three billion people were going to lose their lives in about eighty days. Allowing eight days for the Tags to be delivered to their homes. Stopping that delivery had to be the primary goal.
The most difficult part of my plan was to gain the trust of Sir Thomas, and use that trust to gain access to the Hawks. I had an in via his asking me to write his memoirs, but how to go beyond that I hadn’t yet worked out. I had to come up with a way to push his buttons, to get him to accept my word as trustworthy and then… And that was it, I didn’t really know what was going to happen. And Gabriel’s advice in that area was noticeably vague.
I took a sip of my coffee as the sun peeked over the horizon then I turned and went into the house. The sun cast its warmth on my back when I returned to the unfolded Devstick under the table, under the heat pads. I called up Gabriel’s file of information and pressed delete. I couldn’t keep the information on the Devstick — it was too much of a risk — and anyway I had what I needed in my head.