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“Well, well, what do we have here?” says the tallest of the three.
“Really?” says Risa, disgusted. “â??‘What do we have here?’ Is that your best line? If you’re going to attack a defenseless girl in an alley, at least try not to be cliché about it.”
Her attitude has the desired effect. It catches them off guard and makes the leader—a prime douche, if ever there was one—take a step back. Risa makes a move to push past, but a beefy kid, fat enough to block her way, eclipses her view of the end of the alley. Damn. She really hoped this didn’t have to get messy.
“Porterhouse don’t like uppity girls,” says the Prime Douche. He smiles, showing two of his front teeth are broken.
The fat kid, who must be Porterhouse, frowns and solidifies his mass like a nightclub bouncer. “That’s right,” he says.
ta is not amused. “Save your morbid sense of humor for the girls who fawn over you.”
Cam blots his face with a towel, grabs a sip of water, and asks, as innocently as he can, “Are you building a better me?”
“There is only one Camus Comprix, dear. You are unique in the universe.”
Roberta’s very good at telling him the things she thinks he wants to hear—but Cam is very good at getting past that. “The fact that you’re going to Molokai says otherwise.”
Roberta is careful in her response. She speaks as if navigating a minefield. “You are unique, but my work doesn’t end with you. It is my hope that yours will be a new variation of humanity.”
“Why?”
It’s a simple question, but Roberta seems almost angered by it. “Why do we build accelerators to find subatomic particles? Why did we decode the human genome? The exploration of possibility has always been the realm of science. The true scientist leaves practical application to others.”
“Unless that scientist works for Proactive Citizenry,” Cam points out. “I want to know how creating me serves them.”
Roberta waves her hand dismissively. “As long as they allow me to do my work, their money is far more important to me than their motives.”
It’s the first time Roberta has referred to Proactive Citizenry as “they” instead of “we.” Cam begins to wonder if the whole debacle with Risa has put Roberta in the organization’s dog house. He wonders how far she’ll go to get back into their good graces.
Roberta goes upstairs, leaving Cam to finish his workout, but his heart is no longer in it. He does take a moment, though, to examine his physique in the mirrored wall.
There were no mirrors when Cam was first rewound—when the scars were thick ropy lines all over his body and horrible to look at. Those scars are now gone, leaving behind smooth seams. And now there can never be enough mirrors for him. His guiltiest pleasure is how much he enjoys looking at himself and this body they’ve given him. He loves his body, yet that still falls short of loving himself.
If Risa loved me—truly and without coercion—then I could bridge that gap and feel it myself.
He knows what he has to do to make that happen—and now that Roberta will be five thousand miles away, he can begin the work necessary to bring this about without fear of her persistent scrutiny of everything he does. He’s been stalling for much too long.
* * *
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Who are we? We are the two steps forward for every one step back. The silence between the beats of your father’s new heart and the breeze that dries a troubled child’s tears. We are the hammer that shatters the glass ceiling of longevity and the nail in the coffin of deadly disease. In a sea of uncertainty, we are the voice of reason, and while others are doomed to relive the past, we challenge ourselves to prelive the future. We are the dawn’s early light. We are the silky blue behind the stars. We are Proactive Citizenry. And if you’ve never heard of us, well, that’s all right. It just means we’re doing our job.
* * *
As soon as the limo spirits Roberta off the following morning, Cam gets to work on the computer in his room, moving his hands across the large screen as if casting a spell. He creates a nontraceable identity on the public nimbus—the global cloud so dense it would plunge the world into eternal darkness were it real instead of just virtual. He knows all his activity is monitored, so he piggybacks on an obsessive gamer somewhere in Norway. Anyone monitoring him will think he’s developed an interest in Viking raids on drug-dealing trolls.
Then, obscured within the nimbus, he tweaks and strokes the firewall of Proactive Citizenry’s server until it opens for him, giving him access to all sorts of coded information. But for Cam, making sense of the random and disjoint is a way of life. He was able to create order within the fragmented chaos of his rewound brain, so pulling order out of Proactive Citizenry’s protective scramble will be a walk in the park.
22 • Risa
Omaha. Arguably the geographic center of the American heartland. But Risa does not feel very centered. She needs to be elsewhere, but has no destination, no plan. More than once she has felt that leaving the protection of CyFi’s little commune was a mistake—but she was an outsider among the people of Tyler. Now Risa must live in the shadows. She sees no way out of it. She sees no future that doesn’t involve hiding.
She keeps hoping she’ll see signs of the Anti-Divisional Resistance—but the ADR has fallen apart. Today, she keeps thinking. Today I’ll find a path to follow. Today I’ll be hit by a revelation and I’ll know exactly what I need to do. But revelation has become a scarce commodity in Risa’s solitary existence. And beside her, she hears:
“It’s a birthday gift, Rachel—one that your father and I will be paying a pretty penny for. At the very least you could be grateful.”
“But it’s not what I asked for!”
