“But that is delusional,” Willing said. “At your age, the main menace isn’t rapists and robbers, or waves of marauders in a second Dark Ages—or anything else from the outside. Every day, you face down the enemy within. So the one commodity that you bigging can’t buy, more than any other, is safety. Why doesn’t that release you? From trying to protect what you’re going to lose anyway? It should make you feel brave.”
“You’re one to talk about brave,” Nollie said bitterly, and her tonal turn injured him; he’d put a big effort into that soliloquy, which he thought had come out rather well. “Were you talking trash, for fun? Or have you seriously considered slumbering?”
“Yes,” he said. “I have.”
“So if I offered to spend the bancors on putting you into a self-induced coma for five years, you’d take me up on it.”
In truth, the proposal was immediately tempting. “You say that with disgust. But would five more years of ass-wiping at Elysian Fields improve on sleep? I love to sleep.”
“Willing.” Arms folded, she confronted him square on, her back to the counter, trapping him against the stove with that look. She was so much shorter than he was; he was damned how she managed to seem daunting. “I don’t often play the elder, and deliver judgment from on high. So hear me out this once. All through the early thirties, you were sly. Resourceful. Inventive. Disobedient. Impossible to intimidate. I used to love watching you stand your ground with that cretin Lowell Stackhouse, though he was three times your age. There was a somethingness about you. Sorry. I’m not as articulate as I used to be. Too many brain cells down. Too much homemade hooch. But the somethingness, it’s what fiction writers like me—former fiction writers like me—it’s what we always try to pin to the page. We always fail. That doesn’t mean it isn’t out there, only that it’s impossible to capture, like those tiny, nefariously evasive moths you can’t grab from the air. Even at Citadel. You worked so hard. You savored the effort. You were tilling fields like an ox, and the somethingness only thrived. But ever since the chipping, you’ve gone gray. You seem like other people. The boy I knew in 2030 would never have squandered his great-aunt’s resources on sleep.”
“The chip,” he said. “I doubt it’s messed with my mind in the way you’re implying. They’re not that clever. It probably is merely a means of accounting. Though a means of accounting that won’t let me cross the street against the light.”
“Cheating,” Nollie agreed, “is restorative. It maintains your dignity. Breaking a rule a day keeps the doctor away far better than a fucking apple.”
“In the fields at Citadel,” he went on, “we had plenty of time to talk. Avery told me about how hard it was for cancer patients when they got better. She said that when you’re bigging sick, making it to the next day is a victory. When you’re well again, being alive isn’t a triumph anymore. She said patients often got depressed not during chemo, but after it had worked. For me, the thirties. They were exciting. Our whole family—over and over, we almost died. When the fleX service went down on the trek to Gloversville, and we had to rely on Esteban, and on the paper map I stole from a recharging station—there was no guarantee we were going to make it. It was a miracle the recharging station even carried a paper map to steal. Carter could barely walk, because of his knees. Bing had something like trench foot, from his shot-out shoe and wet socks. And then we got to that narrow, unpaved drive and found the tiny label on the mailbox, CITADEL? We cried. But now. It’s this grinding in place. No horizon, no direction, and no threat. We may not keep much of my salary, but we’ll probably be all right, even without your bancors. That’s part of the problem. The okayness. The nothing but okayness. So chip or no chip. It’s not exciting.”
“Well, then,” Nollie announced decisively. “We won’t buy safety. We’ll buy excitement.”
Willing discovered the very next afternoon, as he had as a boy, that the most exciting excitement is free.
Nollie frowned. “You’re back early. Were you fired?”
“I fired,” he said, his breath quick. “It’s not a passive construction.”
“What?”
“I never really expected it at Elysian,” he said, pacing. He was probably disheveled. The way you look after you’ve squeezed into a linen cupboard. “Nothing happens there. Even when people die, it’s more nothing-happening. It’s expected. Or not-dying. That’s expected, too. I carry because I always have, since I was sixteen. Call it a fetish. A dependency. And I’m not the only one. You need money to feel safe, but I don’t trust money. After our whole family was forced from this house at midnight in the rain, I need a gun. I like the fact that, like you said, it’s against the rules. For most people, packing is a bigging bad idea. The Supreme Court was right. But it’s not a bad idea for me.”
“Unfortunately, that’s what everyone thinks,” Nollie said. “Now, stop. Organize yourself.”
“I have no idea whether I killed him.”
“An excellent first line for a short story. But even a story would have to back up.”
“I don’t know the guy well.” Willing bombed onto the sofa, to force himself to sit still. “Little older than me, maybe thirty-five. He’s on staff—was. Since even if he makes it, well—Elysian definitely has grounds for dismissal now. Always looks under-slept. Probably has a night job, too. I talked to him last week, at lunch. He supports his sister, who’s a striker. He tops up his younger brother’s slumber account, because it’s cheaper to keep the brother in storage than to support him if he’s unemployed. This guy, Clayton. His wife got pregnant. They both wanted the baby. Badly. But there was no way they could afford to keep it. She’d just had an abortion. He seemed pretty shredded about it. Looking back, I guess he was twitchy. But those ‘warning signs’ you’re supposed to look out for. They only seem obvious in retrospect. In the present—stressed, angry, having money problems, expressing resentment of shrivs—they apply to everyone I know.”
“Your friend Clayton shot up the nursing home.”
Nollie was hardly psychic. The protocol had become such a cliché.
“I don’t know where he got the gun, but that amnesty in the thirties was a farce.”
“Any idea of the body count?”
“Not really. He started with the morts, so that would have upped the numbers. I’m sure you could go online and find reports of casualties anywhere from ten to a hundred and forty. The usual.”
“You took him down.”
“Does that impress you?” In truth, Willing was in shock. For fifteen years, the Shadow had been a mere mascot—part companion, part lucky charm, a metal version of Milo. He’d almost forgotten what it was engineered to do: something a bit more drastic than “sit.”
“I’m impressed that you didn’t let him go at it. Your mother told me you advocated ‘shooting’ Luella well before my father did the honors. She worried that having said that might have made you feel bad later.”
“It didn’t,” Willing said.
“Fifa will disapprove. She’ll think you should have joined in.”
“I had a clear line of sight from the cracked-open door of the closet where I was hiding. The chance wasn’t going to last. I had to make a split-second decision. I think I only hit his shoulder. An orderly pinned him when he dropped. I slipped out in the pandemonium. The trouble is—”
“You’re more energized than I’ve seen you in years.”
“So that’s the answer. To my malaise. Shoot people.”
“Seems a start.”
“I might have been seen. That orderly could have noticed it was me.”