Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

“The stories are great, but I don’t hear that well,” the Girl said defiantly at one house meeting. “What am I supposed to do? You gonna pay for my modification? No! I read stories, that’s how I memorize.”

No one spoke at first. The young man facilitating the meeting looked sheepish but tried to sound firm and confident.

“Reading isn’t stories. It’s just words.”

Everyone in the Revue was suspicious of the Girl for some time. Nat paid perhaps the least attention to her and Tina was the first to warm up to her.

“I’ve never been one for security clearances,” she’d said to the Girl after a rehearsal. “They’ll always find what they’re looking for, even if it’s not there. Might as well be open.”

The Girl smiled broadly, could not control herself, and rushed to embrace a surprised Tina. She responded to the Girl’s embrace knowing only that they both needed to be held at that moment.

After that, the Girl felt she had nothing to hide and began to tell Tina what she’d learned at the House, how modern weapons and company security were coded in rudimentary sounds she had learned to unravel. Tina was troubled by what she heard. The Girl was on the verge of being a woman, but, Tina felt, was still too young for what she was carrying around. Nonetheless, she thought the Girl should present to the group in the hopes of decommissioning the units that were disrupting the shows.

“There is the sound and the thing that produces the sound. We think about them together, but as we know they’re separate things: the bell is not the ringing. Well, some folks have learned to blend certain electrical impulses, really to copy what goes on when we imagine a sound in our heads and turn that into a weapon. Who would have thought such a sliver of a thing could ever leave our heads let alone become a force?”

Nat was interested but distracted. Other Revue members became restless and rude during the Girl’s presentation. Violence at the shows was their main focus and preoccupation. Few, if any, were interested in how corporations had come to blend sounds and their sources until the Girl made a connection.

“If you give me one of the fallen units from the attacks at the concert, I can trace it. Of course, once we find the company sponsor, what are we going to do about it? I mean, I guess it’s good information even if we can’t really, you know, do anything with it.”

She now had the full attention of everyone in the room, most especially Nat’s. The idea of tracing the units made his pulse quicken. But then reality chimed in. The Girl was right. Even if they found out which corporation was sending the attackers, what could they do about?

Nat recalled the period when he truly began to understand slavery, how it shaped the world he shared with the non-dark people. The history he lived with. The barbaric attacks on innocent fans felt like something else.

The Girl had put plain light on what had been there for all to see, the problem with the companies, the wealth compounded with control, how even such a minor disruption and breaking of certain rules couldn’t be tolerated by certain people with power. That was his analysis. He didn’t know how the Bird and its earworm sound were connected to people being slashed, hacked, and knocked unconscious.

What had his mentor, the Old Woman, lived through? Things hinted at from the times she had lashed out at him? Where was the teacher who played the trumpet in school? What had happened to the inmates that could not sing and play, to the man with the kora? The only people he’d ever seen that were close to being free and happy were the ones running the prison, and some of them would have been happy to let him drown during the storm. None of it was enough. Now, they were opening the skulls of people who had come to see him do the one thing that drew him close to any semblance of happiness. His anger was so sudden and fearful that, for a moment, he was paralyzed. The grim stupor gripped him and passed, but the rawness that fueled it imploded and compacted.

Members of the Revue were more than happy to take time off from touring to let the Girl explain how to trace units to their companies of origin, to sort through the layers of subsidiaries and get to the principal. There were mixed opinions on what to do, though.

“Why don’t we shame and expose the subsidiaries too? They’re just as bad as the root corporation,” said the drummer.

“I say we take a break from the stage and chill for a while, wait this thing out,” said the pianist.

“Take a break, yes, but only to search out these sons-of-bitches. I want to feel somebody’s throat in my fists,” said the trumpet player.

Tina, exasperated, rose and spoke, at first a bit too loudly, and everyone had to slam their hands over their ears to prevent damage. She modulated her volume.

“We don’t even know who these people are or why the hell we’re their targets,” she said as she sat back down. “At least let her finish telling us what the deal is,” she said, turning to the wiry, dark trumpet player, “before you start crushing people’s windpipes.”

Nat slipped out of the meeting. He was ashamed of feeling like the trumpeter, having the urge to feel the life being forced from someone’s body in retribution for the concert violence and all the things that had become tangled with it in his mind. He would never be able to admit that to Tina. But he had found a glimmer of hope, if not redemption, when something the Girl said clicked with his memory of the rescue mission. He went to his room to find the old probe.

The Scientist and the Author were using copious amounts of their now substantial combined revenue streams to search for their daughter. The firms they employed were among the best. At least one had been used by the first CEO who had used the sleeping cure. None of them had any experience with the more primitive methods of trail encryption the Girl had learned from Gen and company.

Months passed. The only thing that lifted the parents’ spirits was the occasional lurid pink feather they would find in the Girl’s room or loads of crap the bird left outside of the window. They never saw or heard the creature itself. The Author had dreams where she and the Scientist would “discover” that the feathers and the droppings were hallucinations, mirages they had deluded themselves into seeing. She would awake just as they fell despairingly into each other’s arms.

One day, the Scientist arrived at the home of one of his wealthy repeat customers only to find the place surrounded by security. He’d seen lights from a distance but had assumed it couldn’t have been his client’s location where the incident was taking place, since the Scientist had received no call or signal of any type.

When he got close enough for the elite frequency sirens to be picked up by anyone, security confronted his transport unit and insisted he come inside. They refused to answer his questions but bombarded him with their own. It wasn’t until they allowed him to re-board his transport and head home that he discovered the woman whose condition he’d come to check on was dead.

She was the first of his clients to die. When the third one died, the Scientist relented to the Author’s advice to seek legal counsel. By the fourth death, he was in custody. When a fifth death occurred, the outcry from corporate sectors for his punishment was so great that authorities scheduled his trial. This, despite the fact that the fifth murder took place while he was in custody.

It seemed nothing could save him. The prosecution argued that the Scientist could have timed the murder to occur while he was detained, to throw them off. The fact that he would lose serious revenue once his clients died meant nothing next to the utter befuddlement of the authorities. The closest thing they had to a clue was that the Scientist was the only thing all the victims had in common. Attempts by the less elite wealthy clients to save him were utterly thwarted by stories bought and sold by the most elite clients who had been completely cured, in no small part because they were late to the party and still needed treatment. Stories of vengeance sold well on all platforms, and the wealthy needed vengeance.