John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

She stared at him. “Jesus, Corte.”

“You think I’m… going off the deep end over this?”

She shook her head slowly. “You never talked much shop with me, all these years. You were real tight-lipped. It was part of your job to be, I guess. If you’re telling me things now, you got to be worried for real, for serious reasons.”

He nodded, smiling ruefully. She was too smart to simply assume that he was right. She’d had to reason it out. “I can’t play along with them, Janet, even if they weren’t going to go after me. I can’t handle it. It’s… I’d be a traitor to my country to play along with them. Because they’re traitors. This bullshit is un-American.”

“Now I got something to tell you that you maybe didn’t know.”

He waited. She’d genuinely startled him.

“About my brother. I told you he was working overseas for SOCK-Vuh…”

“For what?”

“Shell-Oil-Coca-Cola-Viacom.”

“Oh. SOCCV. Pronounce it Sock-Vee. What about it?”

“That was a lie. There’s another reason you never met him. Stu’s in New York. He’s in the Black Freedom Brotherhood. But so far as we know, he hasn’t got warrants out on him. I don’t condone the Brotherhood, they’re terrorists. That’s what I told him too. But… he’s my brother.”

“Okay. You think the Company knows about him?”

“We don’t know if they do. There’s nobody looking for him as far as I’m aware. You people know about all of ’em?”

“Of course not.” He shook his head. “Christ, what if Agency finds out…”

“I know. Eventually… so, I was thinking… well, first: What’re you going to do about all this?”

“Do? I’m going to see how bad it looks. Try to confirm my suspicions. If it looks bad, I take you and Cindy and we run.”

“Uh-huh. Where? Where that’s worth going to?”

“What else you want me to do?”

She hesitated.

“Go on,” he said.

“Okay, um—well, look, honey… if we got to run, it’s better if we have something to run to. An umbrella. Some people have already got shelters set up. Now, I don’t condone the Brotherhood—and I wouldn’t want to join them. But they could help us, put us in touch with these other people…”

“What other people?”

“The New Resistance.”

His eyes widened. “You want to join the NR?”

She shook her head. “But they could help us. Maybe they’d expect something in return. Information, something. Why not?”

“But they’re guerrillas. Criminals.”

She shrugged. “Supposedly. And supposedly—so is my brother. But if you think the Company is going to kill you… what else have we got?”

He tried to think of a reply. He couldn’t. He heard the TV talking with newscaster semi-seriousness in the next room, something about another acid-rain alert. Secretary of the Interior warning that acid rain falling in the Midwest could cause wheat and corn shortages, but “ famine is too strong a word.” At this time.

That morning, the president had asked Congress to give her emergency powers of absolute authority on a temporary basis—to keep order as the danger of a New-Soviet first strike increased; citing the New-Soviet destruction of two US orbital antimissile battle stations; citing also increased domestic terrorism from “race extremists on the left”—meaning black and Jewish activists. Insisting that the grant of absolute authority was only temporary…

They were making it sound as if the threat of all-out nuclear war was nearing the flashpoint. Hearing that, he should have been scared. But all he could think about was: Criminals. We’ll become criminals if we run to those people.

When Janet asked again, “What else can we do?” he still had nothing to say.

“The strange truth is,” Smoke was saying as his crow, Richard Pryor, fluttered restlessly on his shoulder, “most people don’t see the Grid. That is, they don’t know it for what it is when they see it. They aren’t able to step back from it. Or they think it’s only the Internet or the Web or something—and that’s only a quadrant of it. Let’s step back from it now and look at it squarely…” He turned and switched on the big videoscreen that stretched across the wall like a blackboard behind him. It hummed, flickered with light…

It was hot in the briefing room, though it was seven in the evening. The windows were open. Mosquitoes whined and ticked at the screens. Glancing out the window, Charlie saw the searchlight on the guard tower swinging over the sandy ground outside the NR’s Coordination Center.

He looked back at Smoke, and shifted on the metal chair, wincing at the pain in his buttocks. His fingers hovered over the keyboard of his lap console.

Charlie Chesterton was one of the people they didn’t make metal chairs for; he was too skinny for them. He was tall, bony, a little round-shouldered, a touch weak-chinned. He was twenty-three, and he wore his hair in a young man’s fashion: the triple Mohawk; three fins, each a different color and each color significant, the middle one signifying he was a Technicki Radical Unionist; the one on his right was blue for his profession, digitech; the one on the left was green for the neighborhood he’d grown up in the floating boro of New Brooklyn. He was wearing a sleeveless clip T-shirt, this one looping through a Jerome-X video, the same scenes over and over.

There were six other NR trainees in the hot room, in the New Resistance CC, on the tiny island of Merino.

Behind Smoke, the screen, volume muted, flashed through its parade of media baubles, a weirdly inappropriate backdrop for him.

Smoke, in his sleeveless black jumpsuit, was gaunt, hawk-nosed, tired-eyed, dark; his movements were swift, almost abrupt. But sometimes he’d slide seamlessly into a deep calm that seemed so smooth, so untouchable, you felt you were looking into the face of a man who’d spent his life in a monastery.

He had a look on his face like that now as he paused, faintly smiling, looking sedately at them from the front of the briefing room.

And then he came out of it with a sudden slash of his hand, making them rock back in their seats, his crow flapping irritably to a perch on the windowsill, as he said, “It’s going to shape you, your family, your friends, unless you—unless we—shape the Grid first! Learning to shape it starts with redefining it. The Grid is a three-leveled system. The first level is Worldtalk-type packaging of products, people, ideas, styles of behavior, socially useful prejudices, and, of course, some ‘news,’ all mixed into a solution of entertainment or simple distraction. That level is then fed into the second level, which is all the transmissions: all forms of TV and holo transmission; Internet, obviously; standard radio and bone-implant receiver radio; home consoles, schools consoles; smartfone tabloids; daily news-sheets you buy at the printout kiosk; electronic billboards, video billboards; every other kind of long-range communications between computers. Visorclips, earmites, downloads: all filtered through the Grid in some way. Even Charlie’s T-shirt there…”

Charlie shifted uncomfortably in his seat. Smoke’s crow tilted its head to peer at him suspiciously with its glittering eyes.

Charlie wanted badly for Smoke to like him. He’d read all of Smoke’s essays, books of them written before Smoke had been caught up in the chaos surrounding the war in Europe. Smoke had been abducted by the Second Alliance, tortured, escaped through one of the war’s multitude of wild variables; wandered lost in the deepest circles of a private hell. And had come back, resurrected from what his public had thought was his death and what had been, at least, the death of his sanity. He had emerged not unscathed but unbroken. Jack Brendan Smoke was a legend in the underground.