Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

She noticed that one person of indeterminate gender and dressed rather well to be on a transport did not seem concerned about being tossed about, was not excited, but moving deliberately as if it were normal to be getting off here where everyone else was kicked off. The calmness the Girl saw on the person’s face turned to sadness when their eyes met. The person looked at the Girl’s mismatched possessions and tried to smile bravely as if to encourage her, but the smile took a bit too much effort.

The Girl noticed the operators were closing in and she continued to gather her things to exit the transport. The Person followed her.

“Do you have a place?”

It was one thing to exchange half smiles with a stranger on the transport. Conversation was another level of engagement. The Girl wanted to act as though she hadn’t heard the person speak. But, off the transport, in the hustle of the overly bright city, she relented.

“Not here,” she replied, unable to hide her uneasiness.

“That’s fairly obvious. I’ve never seen you in the car.”

“You always take it to the end and in those clothes?”

“You wear what you have. There is a place I can show you. It’s not much to speak of, but it’s safe.”

The Girl decided to follow the person. Their destination was a few units away. Fewer and fewer people were on the street, but it became noticeably louder. Their clothing was dull. Most of the people were dark. Hair mods abounded, especially with the women and the neutral gendered.

“I’m Gen,” said the person. “Do you prefer a name?”

Gen, boy that’s original , thought the Girl. Why not just call yourself person ? But she kept those thoughts to herself. The Person, Gen, was showing her kindness.

When Gen and the Girl entered the place where Gen lived, the silence was the first thing the Girl noticed, perhaps because it had been so loud outside. What’s more, it was a large open area crowded with young people with trendy, homemade mods; fake third eyes; heart-shaped lips and foreheads and cheeks with the glowing red circled A. Most wore probes of some type. There were many doors on one side and in the wall facing the door. She assumed they opened to sleeping units.

How and why did so many people—there must have been fifty or so—stay so quiet? It seemed unlikely they had the money to condition the place. But who knew?

“They let her sleep past her stop,” Gen announced to the group, “and she has no preference.”

Tina was on stage giving it all she had, as usual. It was only when she stopped singing that she noticed sweat was stinging her eyes. She wiped them for relief and in the hopes that she was not seeing what she thought she saw. The level of noise in the place dropped when she went silent. She could almost hear the noise of the scuffle she saw off to her right where other audience members were clearing away. Two people were trying to subdue a third person who had steel blue skin.

Where was security? In a moment there would be chaos. Nat jumped from the stage with his guitar. The crowd noise was up again. Those who hadn’t yet noticed the fight closed in around Nat, thinking he’d come to be with them. They stepped back when he swung the instrument off his shoulder and held the neck with both hands like a bat.

The steel blue creature turned just in time to take the blow from the instrument full in the face. It staggered but seemed like it would recover. Nat struck again and it fell.

There had been violence now at three shows in a row. Horrific wounds were sold to low-end screeners. Nat and Tina and other Revue members had nightmares full of screaming, bloodied fans. Still, the dismissive bluster of some in the Revue who had returned to society was now replaced with an even more cynical resolve.

Nat was the exception. Even the ugliness of prison had not hardened him to where he could rest with pleas for mercy from innocent fans. It spun in his head day and night. It distracted him during rehearsal. He’d almost swallowed a mod offered by one of the singers. He’d confronted her earlier because he thought she was an addict. He only refused the offer when he noticed the sexual glint in the woman’s expression and realized he would be accepting more than the drug.

He had become more rigidly monogamous and regimented as the tour had become more successful. He was always practicing or recording. The constant and detailed scheduling felt somehow like the opposite of prison, even as something about having been in prison drove him to nail down as much time as possible. The free moments he had, he spent with Tina. It was the only time he was not focused on a current or future task. Even so, when he was not with her, he kept planning to ask her not to dance so provocatively on stage. It seemed wrong in public, somehow.

After a minor surge because of the publicity, show attendance dropped because of the violence. The sparser crowds included more people with head and neck mods. Nat thought he recognized a few people from LJ’s.

The Revue’s meetings had become subdued. Tina didn’t have to make the usual repeated calls to order. No one was discussing the crowd reaction to a particular song or new improvised section. The direct security were particularly low key, having been probed into depression. Someone or something at the shows was digging deep enough into the security folks to make them all but immobile when the attacks were happening. A few had quit. No one had so much as applied to be added to the force, even with increased pay.

The Security that had stayed on were always looking to prove themselves. This only heightened tension in the Revue. They scared people during one meeting when the alarms sounded. One even forgot the rule about weapons at meetings and nearly brandished hers when the alarm voice noted two figures the system had never scanned approaching the east door. She put her weapon away when the Girl and a quite forlorn Gen came to the screen. They hugged for what seemed like forever. After that, the Girl looked sad. Everyone watching felt they were watching a final farewell.

The Girl was torn. On the one hand, she had set out to join Nat and Tina’s Revue and she’d finally made it to the door. The people in the house with Gen had not been easy to live with. Still, the place fascinated her.

It was there she had learned how sound was encrypted at the weapons factory to pass sensitive data from one monitored printer to the next to create the most sophisticated weapons, hot borders, and robot defense grids. Very few outside of the house or the plant Gen infiltrated suspected anything as primitive as sound could, or would, be used to create such complex real and virtual weapons.

Gen was one of the rare workers whose brain could encrypt. House members would painstakingly download seemingly innocuous scraps left in Gen’s implants and decode the information. The Girl had immersed herself in the coding and unraveling of the barriers between nations such that she felt she could travel anywhere in the world without a visa, though, for some reason, she had little desire to try.

But the most significant thing the Girl had learned at the house with Gen, the thing she was most anxious to share with the Revue, was how to tell stories. All the formulas for coding and decryption were memorized and passed on orally with fetishistic attention to detail. The training for this began with learning and reciting old stories. Rooms in the house were filled with handbooks, some of which were hundreds of years old, fragile, brittle, and hardly ever brought out into the light. The frail condition of the books further inspired people in the house to memorize the stories. It had become one more thing—not to commit to writing—along with the house security measures. As much as she loved holding the contours of stories in her mind, the Girl had mixed feelings about the high place oral storytelling held in the culture of the house, which included passing stories orally.