“I saw how you came for me. What you did.”
“You’re upset about the loss of your boyfriend, the man with the names.” He sounded faintly mocking, or maybe she was reading that in. She was distantly angry, the emotion a shooting star barely visible against the blazing light of the sun of her grief. She fancied she could hear them calibrating their model of her, placing a high value on such an exotic emotional state.
“You’re changing the subject. When you murder as you did, you do not make the case for helping you. When you take away my dearest love, you show me you shouldn’t be trusted. When you bargain with me, strapped into your chair, you make me think you’re lying about your ability to run me as a sim. The only reason I can imagine for you to have this conversation with me is because I have something you need, and you can’t get it any other way.”
There was no reply to that.
After several minutes, she said, “Hello?”
No answer came. Time passed. Being confined to her tiny cell had been awful, but at least she could move her limbs, shift her posture. Go to the toilet. Strapped in like this –
She stifled her rising panic. If they wanted to demonstrate their superiority, they might terrorize her by leaving her like this. Feeling terror would only demonstrate the viability of the tactic. She might be incarcerated by these people for a long time, and they were doubtlessly building a dossier of effective techniques for securing her compliance.
She waited as long as she could. “I have to pee.” There was a guard in the room: visor, mask, ear piece. His body-language told her he was looking at something she couldn’t see, hearing something she couldn’t hear. Maybe he was watching T.V., or a countdown-timer that ticked down the seconds until this part of the experiment was done. She could tell he’d heard her.
“Please.”
He pretended he hadn’t heard her. “Michael, if you make me piss myself, you won’t do anything to convince me that you’re a humane, reasonable person I want to cooperate with.”
She clamped down on her bladder and thought about other things: hard coding problems she’d returned to again and again when she had a moment, trying to get things that should have worked to work; Jimmy’s story (carefully skirting his death), the fight she and Jimmy conducted at the original B&B. She envisioned the steps she’d taken to help recondition the Thetford bicycle fleet, a huge cohort of printed carbon-fiber mountain bikes that were bent, broken and smashed by the previous warm season’s worth of off-roading, which she and Etcetera and others systematically reconditioned, creating a factory line to strip, evaluate, reassemble and test each piece, brainstorming solutions to the perverse mechanical problems of stubborn physical matter.
She really needed to pee. She wondered if they’d given her a diuretic in her last squeeze-tube. It’d be a way to ensure this situation arose. Maybe they wanted to calibrate their model with an image of what happened when she was humiliated.
“I don’t have to clean it up.”
The guard didn’t acknowledge her.
She held it for two more minutes, by her slow count, then let go. She grabbed her mood with iron pincers and refused to let it veer into humiliation because it was just piss. They won if she let this enrage her. That was far worse than the cold, stinking piss that stuck the paperish coveralls to her legs.
She didn’t say anything after that. She focused on those bicycles, the delight of suddenly realizing the solution to a puzzle that stymied them all, pulling the troublesome bike out of the pile, having it work. Etcetera came up with gnarly ways to get mangled parts free, adjusting gearing mechanisms that seemed unadjustable.
Her breathing slowed. It occurred to her she was almost dozing as she contemplated these memories. She might spend the rest of her life with these memories, polishing them like a widow polishing framed wedding photos. So be it. She could still walk away, in her mind. Fuck them.
Then she wondered if this was another part of the calibration, and had to clamp down to keep from crying.
Try as she might, she couldn’t find that place of memory again. Eventually they brought her back to her cell.
The next day, they put her in leg irons, bagged her head and brought her into a vehicle that jounced and jostled for an unguessable time. She was brought into what was unmistakably a bus that stank of unwashed humans and sounded like a bad day on a mental ward. She was belted into a seat, her hands attached to restraints at her sides. There was a person next to her, also seated. When the guards who’d brought her in went away, she said hello.
“Hello.” It was a woman’s voice.
“Can you see?”
“You mean, do I have a bag on my head? Naw. Why do you?”
She shrugged.
“Where are we?”
“Kingston,” the voice said.
“Ontario?”
“Not Jamaica.” A snort of laughter. Limpopo got the sense others listened in on their conversations, a localized stillness of eavesdroppers.
“Where does this bus go?”
“You’re shitting me.”
“I’m not. It’s – They killed my friends, took me in, held me. Bagged me and brought me here. Now I don’t know where I’m going.”
“Prison. Kingston Prison for Women.”
“Oh. I guess that makes sense.”
“If you say so.” Limpopo had been away from real human contact for so long she caught herself warming to this stranger, who could be an undercover interrogator, or even just not a nice person.
“What’s your name?”
“Jaclynn,” the woman said. “What’s the G stand for?”
“G?”
“Your transfer paperwork. It’s stuck to your chest. Says you’re G. Denton.”
She shrugged. She should have known she wouldn’t be committed to the system as Luiza Gil, let alone Limpopo. As toothless as the Brazilian consul was, as distant and hunted as walkaways were, for so long as she had her name, she could be found. She wasn’t to be found until they were ready to put her on display, if that day ever came.
“G? To be honest, I have no idea.” She thought of Kipling’s “great gray-green, greasy Limpopo.”
“Amnesia, huh?”
“Not exactly.”
“You’re a real mystery, you know? Bag on your face, no name.”
“I have a name. I just don’t know what name they’re sending me up under.”
“What name were you tried under?”
“No trial. Just snatched. Political. I’m walkaway.”
“One of those? Figures. Seem to run into plenty of you-all whenever I’m enjoying the hospitality. Hey! Any walkaways on the bus?”
Voices raised in reply. Catcalls and groans too. Under her hood, Limpopo grinned. She wondered what “G” stood for.
6
THE NEXT DAYS OF A BETTER NATION
[I]
THE WEIRDEST THING about getting old was not sleeping. Tam routinely found herself awake at hours that she hadn’t seen since she was a teenager. Weird hours when you could spot unsuspected urban wildlife: foraging raccoons, stealthy foxes, bats. Seth, that asshole, didn’t suffer from this problem. Slept like a rock. A bald rock, didn’t have the decency to admit being self-conscious about his receding hair line (“what do you call one hundred rabbits running backwards?” he’d say whenever she raised the subject). She’d had a freak when her hair started going, did several consultations with walkaway docs around the world, found one in Thailand who specialized in trans people, got a file for printable pills she took every day. They did the trick.