Paolo Bacigalupi - The Doubt Factory

Tank wiped his eyes. “Can’t lose any more, you know?”

“I know,” Moses said solemnly. “I get it. I won’t do anything stupid. I’m not going anywhere.”

“I still don’t get it,” Alix said. “How did you get us here? The elevator opened and—”

“We gassed you,” Cynthia said apologetically. “We gassed the Williams and Crowe guys who were coming up to get you, and then Adam took their place, and we came up and gassed you, too. After that, it was just about staging and calling up the reinforcements.”

“I got to shoot off some sweet guns, too,” Adam called back. “Don’t forget that!”

Cynthia pressed on. “By the time everyone else had gotten up there, you were dead, and they were focusing on cleaning up the scene. The only tense moment was when Adam had to meet up with the rest of the Williams and Crowe people who were stuck hiking up the stairwells. We were afraid someone would make him take off his SWAT helmet and get a good look at him before we could get your bodies out. But everyone was so freaked out by the other guys that we gassed that it was just a matter of wrapping you in body bags and pretending to be the friendly neighborhood ambulance association wheeling you out.”

“That was actually nerve-racking,” Kook said. “I wasn’t expecting your dad to be right at the doors when we came out with you. Lucky he was so focused on you. I thought he’d recognize Cynthia, even with medical glasses.”

“My dad was there?”

Cynthia nodded. “Yeah. I was just glad you looked as dead as you did. He was all over you. You never could have faked through that.”

“Was he mad?”

Cynthia looked at her incredulously. “He thought you were dead , Alix. He was a wreck. Crying and yelling at George Saamsi and Death Barbie. It was a mess.”

Alix swallowed, trying to decide how she felt about the news. Her father was stricken with grief that she’d died. Some part of her felt for his distress, but she couldn’t quite make herself feel sorry. He’d helped kill so many people, and he felt bad only now? Simon Banks cared only when the person dying was his own child. He didn’t feel bad about Moses’s parents or Tank and Azicort. Dad only felt bad when it was personal to him. Alix was interested to discover that she didn’t have much sympathy for him. Mostly, it felt right to her. Maybe now you understand , she thought.

“Where did you get the gas?” Moses was asking.

Kook smirked. “It’s Azicort.”

Cynthia was nodding. “When you absolutely, positively want to give someone a near-fatal coma, most doctors choose Azicort. We had a whole vat of the stuff from the rat raid. Tank rigged a blower. The only real problem was not knowing how much we were dosing you with.” She peered closely at them. “You seem okay, though.”

“The more I hear, the less I want to know,” Moses groaned.

A new fear gripped Alix. “What about the files? We left the files!”

“No! I got them!” Adam called from up front. “You can thank Williams and Crowe for that. I would have missed the bag, but it turned up while we were waiting for the bodies to get cleaned out. And seeing as I was so helpful, I volunteered to take it down to Death Barbie.”

Alix slumped back, relieved. “It worked then. We did it.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” Kook said. She had her headphones pinched between ear and shoulder, and she was typing madly on her blood-smeared laptop. “Our friends just put our description out on the police bands.”

Cynthia hurried over to listen in. “Hell.” Her face turned hard. “I didn’t think Williams and Crowe would risk involving outsiders.”

Kook motioned for Alix. “You got your phone on you?”

“I don’t…” She felt her pockets. “Yeah. Here.”

“You want to call Death Barbie?”

Alix’s skin crawled. “Why?”

“I’ve got an idea.” Kook’s eyes were positively glowing. “And it’ll be way better if she gets a call from the dead.”

“Okay.” Alix dialed.

Lisa picked up almost instantly. “Who is this?” Her voice was breathless.

“You don’t recognize my voice?”

“Alix?”

Her words were suddenly hesitant.

“Tell her to call off the goons or you go public,” Cynthia whispered. She and Kook were messing with the laptop.

“Go public with what?”

“Just tell her!”

When Alix relayed the message, Lisa laughed contemptuously. “You’re just kids.”

“Now play this,” Kook said, and held up her laptop.

“Hang on. I’ve got something for you,” Alix said.

Kook pressed Play. Alix heard a voice that sounded a lot like Adam’s issuing from the speakers.

A conversation back and forth.

“Come on. They’re just kids!”

And then Lisa’s clipped tones.

“Finish it. Clean up the mess.”

A pair of gunshots echoed.

Alix flinched involuntarily.

“It’s done.”

“Good. Now clean up the scene and get the hell out of there.”

Alix felt a sudden, cold rage.

She took the phone back. “Call off your dogs, Lisa, or I’ll send this to every single cop and every single news organization in the city. You might know how to bury some things, but I can make this go viral. If you keep messing with us, I guarantee I can make you famous, at least until someone who’s more important than you decides you need to disappear. It sounds like you people know a lot about making sure lips stay sealed. Your choice. Either you back off or I make you the top of the news cycle.”

She hung up without waiting for an answer.

“How long to our car switch?” Cynthia called up to Adam.

“Van’s waiting in a parking garage at the next exit.”

They all waited in tense silence. Kook was listening to her headphones. Abruptly she broke into a wide smile.

“False alarm. They’re sending out a new description. The emergency vehicle is a false alarm.”

A spontaneous cheer erupted in the back of the ambulance. Alix slumped against Moses, relieved.

“Nice,” he murmured. “You sounded downright dangerous.”

“That’s because I am.”

Moses laughed and wrapped an arm around her and pulled her close. Their blood stuck together.

“Yuck,” Cynthia said. “You two really are a mess.”

She was right. Blood soaked their clothes, smeared their skin, and matted their hair. But as Alix let her head rest on Moses’s sticky, bloody shoulder, she thought that she had never felt so clean.

Dear Dad,

By the time you read this, our lives will have changed so much that we may not even be the same people anymore.

I’m sure you think I’m crazy for doing this, and I know you feel like I’ve betrayed you, but I finally understood that even though you were always willing to talk to me, you weren’t actually willing to listen.

I know you’ll say that there’s no law against the kind of work you do and that everyone deserves a voice, and, for sure, I can’t think of any way to stop companies like yours from existing, and I definitely can’t think of any way to make companies like yours just shut up.

I mean, free speech is free speech, right?

Anybody can get up and say anything. Anybody can get up and twist and lie and exaggerate and obfuscate. And for money, people like you and George will. But if that’s what you’re willing to do, then you should be famous for it. If that’s your job, you should be proud of it.

You’re the Doubt Factory.

You’re the place where big companies go when they need the truth confused. You’re the place companies go when they need science to say what’s profitable, instead of what’s true. You’re the place companies go when they need to convince people that up is down, and blue is red, and night is day, and wrong is right.