“But you’ll be a hero.”
“I don’t want to turn in the Shadow. I shouldn’t have given away that I have it.”
Nollie squinted. “We could hide it. You could claim to have thrown it in the East River in some PTSD revulsion. We could make up a story about how you’d found it in the house, how it was left behind by squatters. How you’d always planned to turn it in. But look at you. Just now, your face fell. You don’t want my good excuses. You miss urgency. You like the idea of having to leave. Of being on the run.”
She knew him well. And he knew her. So they began talking about what they had been talking about since the previous night, without ever saying so outright.
“I have enough bancors to buy an extremely nice car,” Nollie said. “This time, we wouldn’t have to walk.”
Virtually no one bought a car anymore. Major American cities like New York bore more resemblance to mid-twentieth-century Shanghai than to the whizzing futuristic metropolis of The Jetsons. In eerie silence, multitudes of electric bicycles swarmed single public buses like bees around a queen.
“I’m chipped,” he reminded her. “They can track where I am.”
“If they care. That is, if you were the mass murderer at Elysian and you’d escaped, you’d have a problem there. But you were the good guy. As I understand it, too, the police have to appeal to the Scab to use their satellites, and scabbies are proprietary.”
Granted, despite Fifa’s conviction that they lived in a police state, the powers of the police per se were surprisingly restricted. The FBI was little more than a website. Movie buffs who watched classic thrillers like the Bourne trilogy must have been disconcerted by this mythically demonic organization called the CIA, whose sticky fingerprints no longer stained assassinations and coups all over the globe, and whose Langley headquarters, according to Avery, had been taken over by a discount grocery chain from the Punjab. (In a flurry of films and series from abroad in the thirties, Americans were popular villains: schemers from the Federal Reserve out to defraud innocent investors with sales of bonds they knew full well would soon be worthless, or wicked financiers who escaped the economic depredations of the era by absconding with ill-gotten gains. But in the Korean and Vietnamese entertainment of this decade, American characters were mostly walk-ons—incompetent or hapless buffoons played for laughs.) The powers of the Scab, by contrast, were very real, and veritably limitless.
“Is it even possible?” he asked. “To just—not show up for work, and—go? Wherever you want? Without asking, or filling out a form, or notifying some official?”
Nollie’s smile was pained. “People used to pick up and drive across the country for weeks at a time. Stopping where they wanted. Doing what they wanted. Generally this was called a vacation. Back when wage earners got vacations. But the fact that young people like you think you need permission to careen into the horizon, think it must be against the law to quit a scurvy job without asking—that alone is reason to go.”
“But if it’s true. About the chip. You might get through. For me, it would be suicide.”
“So you can sleep or ass-wipe your life away, or you can take a chance. Which I rate at about fifty-fifty. Sixty-forty maybe,” Nollie said, reconsidering.
“Which direction?”
“Does it matter?”
“I’ll have to ask Fifa to come, too.”
“Of course. Although—well, she talks a good game…”
“I know,” Willing said sadly.
“Let’s get out of here. We have a car to buy. Meanwhile, if anyone comes nosing around looking for the savior of Elysian Fields, you’ll be out.”
Statistically, most people anguish longer over the purchase of a pair of shoes than over whether to buy a house. In kind, two of the biggest decisions of Willing’s life had been dizzyingly expeditious. It took under a second to determine whether to stop a fellow staff member from putting more residents out of their misery and instead to put Clayton out of his. It took less than five minutes to resolve to commit treason.
On the way back from the dealer, they swung by Fifa’s house. Typically, she lived with her parents. Willing had arranged to meet between her railing installations and her shift at the sandwich factory that night (the holiday weekend being extinct). She’d been relieved to hear from him. The shooting at Elysian was already on the news—though the reporting was blasé, nursing home melees having become so commonplace. To give them privacy on Fifa’s stoop in Brownsville, Nollie stayed in the Myourea—Thunderbird in Khmer, a much-coveted import from Cambodia. Its sweet hydrogen lines combined with a 1950s teal-and-cream two-tone drew admiring onlookers.
“You mean, practically right now,” Fifa said incredulously after hearing him out. Her face was ashen, and she needed a shower. She looked hung-over.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We have to throw some things together. I doubt we’ll head out of town until afternoon.”
“Oh, well, that’s different,” Fifa said caustically.
“This isn’t out of the blue. We’ve talked about it before. You thought it would be so cruel. The final frontier, we said. Becoming modern-day homesteaders.”
“We’ve mused about it. But you’ve no idea what it’s like there. Accounts on the web all contradict each other, and you never hear from people who actually live in the Free State. If anyone lives there. The whole population could’ve sunk into the desert from another round of A-bomb tests at Yucca Flats and nobody would know about it here.”
“I love not knowing,” Willing said. “Our future in the old United States is too known. Most of what I know I don’t like.”
“You’re not being practical. I’ve seen pics of the border. It’s worse than Mexico’s fence along the Rio Grande. The walls are massively high, and massively thick, and bristling with guns and soldiers. How would you get across, even if you successfully tippy-toe through the minefield leading up to it?”
“I’ll find out when I get there. Any armor has a chink. And there’s supposedly an underground railroad.”
“Willing, most of what’s on the web is fantasy! Have you ever met a real person in this ‘underground railroad’?”
“All right, no.” He added staunchly, “But other people have made it.”
“All you can be sure of is that other people have disappeared. You can disappear without popping up somewhere else. Have you ever heard from Jarred?”
“No, but they stop communications from getting out. I doubt he’d be able to sail a paper airplane in my direction, much less a fleXt.”
“And you’re assuming that the chip’s self-destruct is treasury. Why would it be? You heard Goog. A whole unit at the Scab, he said. And doesn’t it sound like exactly what they’d program your chip to do, if you had the impertinence to throw down your cotton hoe, and the ingratitude to walk away from the greatest nation on earth? These people are motherfucking T-bills! Seems biggin’ likely to me that instead of allowing you to throw off your chains, they’d rather you be dead.”
“I would rather be dead,” he said, surprising himself, “than stay here. It’s not only the taxes. It’s what I was trying to explain last night. A heaviness. I feel watched. I pay up, as if I have any choice. It’s splug how little is left, but that’s not what gets me down. I feel like a criminal all the time. When I think about it, I’m doing everything I’m supposed to. It’s what my mother told me it was like going through airport security—though I’ve never been on an airplane myself. She said you always felt like you were doing something wrong. Even when you took off your shoes, and removed your ‘laptop,’ and raised your arms in a full-body scanner, like surrendering when you’re under arrest. But I feel that way walking down the street.”