Allen Steele - Jericho Iteration

The phone buzzed.

The answering machine was switched on, but without thinking I snatched the receiver off the cradle and lifted it to my ear. “Hello?” I said.

No voice from the other end of the line; the phonescreen remained blank. Figuring it for a wrong-number call, I was about to hang up when I heard, as if in the background, a brief, swift sequence of electronic snaps, chirps, and beeps.

“Hello?” I repeated. “Who’s there?”

As soon as I spoke again, the electronic noise ceased. There was a moment of silence, and I had almost hung up when I suddenly heard a toneless voice speak from the other end:

“Hello … hello … who’s there … hello …”

“Who is this?” I said, losing patience.

The screen flickered, then random fractals appeared, casting undulating images like electronic finger paintings. A couple more chirps and beeps, then there came a sound like an audiotape being replayed at high speed-high-pitched voices, as if Alvin and the Chipmunks were bleating nursery rhymes from an old NASA space probe lost out beyond Jupiter-as the fractals congealed and began to assume a vaguely human shape. Then:

“Hey, who is this? … hello … who’s there? … hello …”

It was my own voice.

Now the head and shoulders of a person appeared on the screen, but his/her features were in constant flux: eyes, nose, lips, brow, chin, cheekbones, hairline, all changing more rapidly than my eye could follow. Sometimes the face looked like my own, and then it would be me as a woman, then as a bearded woman, then as a black man with a beard, then as a new face entirely.

“Who is this?” I demanded. “Who … hey, Jah, if this is you fucking around, I’m going to unscrew your head and shit down your-”

Throughout all the changes, the face’s lips moved, yet my voice coming from the speaker no longer sounded quite like my own. It had a scrambled, surreal quality: “Jah … if you’re fucking around … hey, Jah, I’m going to shit down your head and unscrew your … who is this? … Jah, I’m going to unscrew your shit and fuck down your …”

The face’s permutations began to slow down, becoming distinctly male, getting younger. Again there were beeps, chirps, and a sound like a tape being fast-forwarded, and then:

“Rosen, Gerard … Gerard Rosen … Gerry Rosen … Can I talk to you, Daddy?”

A new face appeared on the screen.

I slammed down the receiver.

The face stared at me for another instant, then vanished entirely, leaving behind only a blank screen.

For a long time I simply stared at the phone. A soft nocturnal wind whispered outside the window like a ghost asking to come in. I felt my heart pound against the inside of my rib cage, smelled the acrid tang of my sweat. After five minutes my computer’s screensaver switched itself on; bright, multicolored fractals began to undulate across the screen, Mandelbrot equations casting impermanent algorithmic sandpaintings, the black magic of higher mathematics.

And still I stared at the phone, unwilling to accept the face and voice I had just seen and heard.

God help me, it had been Jamie.

A sharp knock at the apartment door brought me back to the present.

“Who’s there?” I called out. No reply; I thought I had been hearing things when there came another knock, a little harder this time.

Probably Chevy Dick, coming over to see if I wanted a beer or something. He had a keycard and knew the codes to disable the front door alarms. I wasn’t in any mood for drinking, but I needed some company right now, so I stood up from the chair and headed for the door. “Okay, hold on,” I muttered. “I’ll be there in a-”

The door slammed open, its lock broken by the force of a violent kick, and four soldiers in riot gear swarmed into the loft.

“Freeze, asshole!” one of them yelled, crouching next to the door, his Heckler amp; Koch G-11 leveled straight at me. “ERA!”

A second later the fire-escape window was shattered by the impact of a rifle butt; I whipped around to see two more ERA troopers coming in through the window.

“Hey, what the fuck are-”

I didn’t get the chance to complete this line of inquiry, as one of the grunts who had charged the front door tackled me from behind. The air was punched out of my lungs as I hit the wood floor face-first; I gasped, fighting for breath, and tried to raise myself on my elbows, only to be forced down when a heavy boot landed against my back.

“Stay down, asshole …!”

I was about to twist out from under the boot when I felt the blunt muzzle of a G-11 press against the nape of my neck.

“I said, stay down!”

I managed to nod my head and lie still, choking on the dust from the floor as I gasped for air, while I heard a cacophony of voices around me:

“Okay, we got him.”

“Check the bathroom!”

“Somebody find a switch! Get some lights on in here!” A second later the room was flooded with light from the ceiling fixture.

“Bathroom’s clear, Sarge! He’s alone.”

“Bell, check the desk. Look and see if he’s got it.”

Sounds of papers been rifled through on my desk, then the snap of the disk drive being ejected. “Right here, Sarge. He’s got it on his screen now.”

“Good deal. You and Todd pack up the CPU. Take all the disks you can find … grab all those papers, too. Find a box or something.”

“Right, Sarge …”

“Romeo Charlie, this is Golf Bravo, do you copy, over …”

“Stay down, buddy. Just stay cool …”

My arms were yanked behind my back as, for the second time that night, a pair of plastic handcuffs were slipped around my wrists and tightened. The boot lifted from my back, but the rifle stayed in place.

“Man, this place smells like shit …”

“Belongs to a reporter, what do you expect?”

Laughter. “Shaddup, you guys … ten-four, Romeo Charlie. Premises secured, no one else present. Ten-fifteen-bravo, Charlie, over …”

I lay still on the floor, but I turned my head to see what was going on at my desk. A couple of troopers were dismantling my computer, one of them holding the CPU in his hands as the other disconnected the cables. A third soldier had found an empty carton and was shoving the manuscript of my novel into it; when he was done, he grabbed the cord of my telephone, ripped it straight out of the wall jack, and threw the phone into the box. Can’t be too careful about these subversive telephones.

“What are you guys doing here?” I demanded. “Why are you-?”

“Shut up,” the trooper behind me said.

I ignored him. “What am I being charged with? What’s-”

“Shut up.” The boot returned to my back, pinning me flat against the floor. “When we want you to talk, we’ll tell you, okay? Now shut your mouth.”

“Ten-four, Romeo Charlie. Ten-twenty-four and we’ll be seeing you soon. Golf Bravo over and out … okay, guys, let’s get out of here before the neighbors catch on.”

The boot and the gun muzzle rose from my back, then two pairs of hands grabbed my arms and hauled me to my feet. “Okay, dickhead,” one of the troopers murmured, “let’s go catch a baseball game.”

If I had any doubts about where I was headed, they were laid to rest by that comment.

I remained silent as I let them march me out the front door of my apartment. Another ERA soldier was standing on the second-story landing, his rifle propped against his hip. The sheet-metal door leading into the newspaper office was still shut; whoever had ordered this raid had apparently drawn the line at breaking and entering the Big Muddy Inquirer. Afraid of the adverse publicity, I suppose.

I was still wondering how they had managed to enter the building without triggering the alarms when we got down to the first floor. Another trooper was standing next to the alarm panel, the PT in his hands hardwired to its innards. He had managed to decode and disable the security system. He barely glanced at me as I was pulled out onto the sidewalk.