AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Mr. Comprix!” No doubt his jogging companion is now talking into his ear piece, spreading the word that Cam is AWOL.
He comes to another path, a wider one, but crosses over it, into a thick copse of bamboo that grows much higher than the cane. The bamboo is dense and hard to push through. It’s there for one reason—to create an environmentally aesthetic façade for the facility behind it. In other words, to hide it. The place doesn’t appear on maps. It doesn’t even show up in satellite photos, at least not the ones available to the public. From the outside it appears to be just a warehouse—the way a movie studio soundstage is a warehouse: a large hollow building that can be redesigned on the inside to be whatever is needed at the time.
There’s no telling what Proactive Citizenry has tinkered and toyed with here. Perhaps this is where they began the great agave extinction by genetically engineering the agave-specific Cyan Snout weevil, but only after buying up massive quantities of tequila that now goes for thousands of dollars a bottle. Or maybe this is where they grafted new faces on people in the Witness Relocation Program—a lucrative government contract that they had for eight years until the program’s budget was cut, making it no longer worthwhile. Or maybe this is where they did all that intensive research that brought about the cure for muscular dystrophy. While the third one was something Proactive Citizenry widely publicized, the first two Cam found unexpectedly while hacking their computer system.
From Cam’s vantage point at the fence, he sees three FedEx trucks at the front entrance. Workers unload cargo. One of the drivers, in familiar purple-and-black shirt and shorts, hands a clipboard to none other than Roberta, who is there to sign for the delivery. Cam thinks it odd that Proactive Citizenry wouldn’t use their own private delivery trucks to shuttle this cargo from the airport, but then maybe the CEO of FedEx is on Proactive Citizenry’s board. After all, it’s the preferred philanthropic organization of corporate America. The more Cam considers it, the more he realizes it must be true. How ingenious! Why go to the mountain when you can use an existing infrastructure to move the mountain to you, one piece at a time?
Cam leaves, having seen what he needed to see. He heads back through the bamboo, takes a different route, cutting through the cane and taro, then onto the jogging path once more, completing his jog back to the house.
One of the ubiquitous guards stands there, not too pleased. “Found him,” he says into his earpiece, then to Cam, “Where’ve you been?”
“Shortcut through the sugarcane. Bad idea, though, the stuff hurts.” He wipes some blood from one of several small scratches on his face.
“Do us all a favor and stick to the path next time. We get crap every time you don’t toe the line.”
“Gotta make life interesting.”
“Dull is fine by me.”
As he goes up to take a shower, Cam considers what he had seen. Those could have been shipments of just about anything, except for one fact. The shipping containers were FedEx stasis packs. Refrigerated. Perfect for live organs, although they’re not usually used for that. But then, Proactive Citizenry knows how to do things without raising red flags. A FedEx plane flies in and out of Molokai daily. How many parts, Cam wonders, are flowing into this complex every day? With so much going in, it’s only a matter of time before things begin coming out. . . .
• • •
Roberta doesn’t trust Cam the way she used to—but like the designers of the security system, she trusts herself and her own ability not to be outwitted. Herein lies the problem of building someone smarter than yourself—because even with the nanite “worm” selectively routing his memory, Cam has no problem duplicating the holographic digital signature of her security badge. That’s
easy. The hard part is finding a way to convince the security computer that Roberta is in two places at once, because an identity signature pinging from two separate locations is certain to trip an alarm. In the end, he takes a different tack, and instead convinces the server that today is, in fact, yesterday. Since no one told the computer that there’s no such thing as time travel, it sees nothing out of the ordinary when history repeats itself in a different place.
The rear door of the secret facility—the factory hidden within the bamboo—opens as obediently as Aladdin’s cave to the correct “open sesame,” now that he has cloned Roberta’s badge.
Cam isn’t sure whether it would help or hinder him to know why he’s doing this. All he knows—and he knows this beyond a shadow of a doubt—is that The Girl whose love motivates him is worth it. The fact that he doesn’t know who she is anymore is irrelevant: His pretweaked self knew, and he trusts that self more than he trusts himself now.
It’s five thirty a.m. There are plenty of guards, but they’re anything but quiet, and he can hide long before they pass by on their routine patrols. There are also plenty of security cameras, but he already has the monitors running happy little video loops of quiet little hallways. The place is his to explore.
Using Roberta’s forged security card, he gains access into several rooms. They’re all the same. Long wards lined with empty beds, perhaps fifty in each. It’s in the fourth room he visits that he hits the jackpot.
In this room, the beds are occupied.
He had a suspicion of what he might see, but imagining it and seeing it are two different things.
In each bed is a rewind, like himself . . . and yet not like himself. Some still wear bandages, but others, whose healing is further along, have the bandages removed, so he can see their faces and much of their bodies. These rewinds bear none of the aesthetic grace that Cam does. They are sloppy and ugly, as if assembled with the perfunctory hand of a hack, or worse, an assembly line. There is no regard to symmetry, or to the balancing of skin tone. Seams cut at strange angles across each figure, and the scars are far worse than any scars Cam ever had. While his scars were treated to disappear over time, he suspects these will have no such treatment.
None of them have yet awakened. They are all in an induced state of preconsciousness—a sort of integration gestation. He suspects that they are being kept comatose much longer than Cam was, as their many parts heal themselves into living beings. This building is their womb, and Cam realizes that this is where he must have begun as well. As Cam walks down the aisle, looking to his left and right at these preconscious beings, he finds it hard to catch his breath, as if the oxygen has been sucked out of the room.
There is one thing they all share other than the commonality of their randomness. Each of them has a mark on the right ankle. At first he thinks they’re tattoos, but when he looks closer he sees that they’re actually seared into the skin. They’re brands. And they say PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY followed by a serial number. The one Cam examines is numbered 00042. The presence of three zeroes suggests they will eventually number in the tens of thousands.
I am the idea, thinks Cam, but they are the reality. And finally, he sees his place in all of this. He will be the face the world sees. The one they become comfortable with. The public image of the military rewind. He’ll be an officer, lauded and honored, and as such, he will not only open the door, but also pave the way for an army of rewinds. Perhaps it will start small. A special force called upon for a key maneuver somewhere in the world, for there are always American interests to protect somewhere, some violent insurgency that must be addressed. REWINDS SAVE THE DAY! the headlines will read. Just as people became complacent and comfortable with unwinding, they will do the same for rewinding. What a fine thing, people will say, that the unwanted bits of humanity can be reformed and repurposed to serve the greater good. Like the way unwanted pork parts can be ground and pressed and reformed into a tasty pimento loaf. Cam would be sick to his stomach, but he feels he doesn’t have the right, because now, more than ever before, he truly has the sense that his stomach is not his own.
“Cam?”
He turns to see Roberta standing at the entrance. Good. He’s glad she’s here.
“You didn’t have to sneak in here. I would have shown you, if you had asked.” Which is, of course, a lie—she already told him her work was top secret. His instinct is to point an accusing finger for the blatant hubris of what she’s done here, but instead, he plays his emotions close, hoping she doesn’t see the bile collecting within him, and he tells her calmly, “I could have asked, but I wanted to see them on my own terms.”
“And how do you feel about what you see?” She watches him closely, so he buries his fury and revulsion. Instead he allows only an acceptable amount of ambivalence to bubble to the surface. “I knew I wasn’t the be-all and end-all of your work . . . but to see it is . . .”
“Distressing?”
“Sobering,” he says. “And maybe a little enlightening.” He looks to the closest rewind, who stirs slightly in preconscious slumber. “Was an army always your plan?”
