Kim Hunter - The Official Report on Human Activity

The Scientist could only reflect on all of this since they’d done outpatient mod to prevent him from speaking lest the guards and who knows who else might fall prey to his sleep-inducing verbiage.

Murder had not been a conscious, preplanned goal when Nat first learned to trace units to sources and then sources to principal shareholders. Even after he screened the story of his mentor, the Old Woman being picked up on some fanciful charge because she’d been linked to him, he had no conscious plans to take anyone’s life.

Indeed, he wasn’t even sure that the probe, even with the mods the Girl suggested, would allow him to drift under the security of the locations he visited. He was amazed and heartened to discover that the old-style probe and sound synthesis completely undid the security systems and live security units, disabled the former and paralyzed the latter. He walked in on the wealthiest of the wealthy unannounced, often waiting for them to get dressed and enter the receiving area, as they always assumed only welcome guests could make it into their inner sanctums.

He began by introducing himself, though some knew who he was. He produced pictures of concertgoers who had been victimized by the “security” units sent by the companies to which the rich person belonged. If his host had posted writings about live shows and earworms, Nat showed their news screens. He then laid out the case that made it clear that the earworm was caused by the Bird and the Bird alone, and that live performance had nothing to do with the affliction. Ideally, he wanted to get to the part about how the ever-warming planet was what enticed the bird to move so far north in the first place. In any event, there was, he stressed, no connection between the earworm and any live performances, including those by the Nat and Tina Turner Revue.

Reactions to his presence and presentation ranged from laughter to horror, from serious engagement to utter silence. Eventually, the security units would begin to wake and were able to move. The first time this happened, Nat panicked and lurched through the probe to re-engage and subdue the security units again.

The sudden movement back into the units permanently damaged or injured several of them, but no one realized this until much later. His panicky reaction also stunned the people Nat had come to speak with. He pulled back, shocked, when he realized the probes he’d used to break security had put him in their minds. He tried to pull away. But he found that he was also pulling out of the security units and that would be his undoing. So he re-engaged to knock out the units. As a result, sometimes the person he’d come to speak with appeared to fall asleep. If not, he would probe them for the root of the thought that live shows were connected to earworms. Could he undo the connections? It was tempting. But he didn’t have the skill, and when those who had managed to stay awake when he had first entered them fell like ragdolls, he would leave. There was no trace of his visit.

The Scientist, who had spent a great deal of his time avoiding interaction or desperately trying to figure out how to make it work, now found himself with more different kinds of people than ever before. Some inmates felt sorry for him when they learned he had been modified and that he couldn’t speak. Some found it frustrating and used the influence they had (he was in a relatively high-end unit) to move him or be moved themselves. Soon he wound up with one cellmate who talked incessantly. He learned more about the man than he knew of his own daughter. Thoughts of his wife and daughter were his shield against the onslaught of words.

The Author’s visits were the only time he was released from modification. But those meetings were timed and brief. During one such visit, his wife entered looking happy but very tired. She did not let him speak and came in only long enough to tell him that he should steel himself. When he appeared ready, she left, and the Girl entered the room.

When she had set out to visit her father, The Girl had been anxious and in a hurry. But she had to move slowly and deliberately so as not to be trailed from Nat and Tina’s. It took more than a day for all of the tracking devices to fall neutral. It took all of her will not to respond with excitement. While she had had sporadic contact with her mother, she had not seen her father for what seemed like a very long time. But even the inner joy she held to herself was short-lived and was replaced with a mix of relief and despair when she actually saw him.

There was an initial spark to his face when he first saw her. They could not touch, but she heard him shout for the first time in her life. His arms shot out to his side as if he were able to grasp her, and then thrust above his head in jubilation. Almost as quickly, his eyes shut over his broad, twitching smile. He sat, and the happiness slowly drained from his face. The grim light of the place, the smell, the reality of her father’s lost freedom settled in on her, overcame her earnest but inadequate attempts to ignore how bad things were for him at the moment, to say nothing of what lay ahead.

He was babbling. She understood when he talked about her mother, the Author, but that was all. His eyes rested when he spoke of her, so she tried to keep the subject there even though she was anxious to know about the legal proceedings. It was hard to keep him on any one topic.

“I spoke to mom yesterday—”

“The trackers they make you swallow, enormous horse pills really. Was she able to get the house back in order? How were the repairs?”

“She said things are coming back and that she’s doing well under—”

“—the circumstances, yes, completely understandable. You know they make me watch the search of the house, screen it night after night, but it’s—” He paused and his eyes began to dart back and forth.

“Mom explained everything. She had some friends look at the search and all the other evidence. One of them wrote a book about it, didn’t even sell as many as mom’s first books, so, no news screens to speak of.”

Thinking of his wife and her work took him back to days after he’d lost his job. How happy he should have been. The only thing he’d done right back then was not to speak openly about his fear that the Author’s work could sell. Thinking about what should have been suddenly gave him the courage to do the right thing now, the courage to more fully face the emotions he’d felt when the Girl entered the room. He moved his face so close to the barrier that she could see the heat from it color his face.

“I love you more than the world,” he said, just as silence overtook him.

Nat came into the house of a man that he knew was of East Asian descent. But he could not tell if the man and/or his family were from what had been China, or Japan, or any of the Southeast Asian countries whose names were so vague to him now. The weight of all the things of which he was ignorant fell upon him and a great wave of anger and resentment surfaced. He hated self-pity and what he felt of it made him even angrier.

“Where are your people from?” Nat all but screamed. The man was almost too frightened to answer. He had realized almost instantly who Nat was, as no one else could have gotten past the defenses.

“What the hell does it matter? Just don’t kill me for God’s sake.”

“You have to stop sending units to our shows. We have nothing to do with the earworm.”

“Earworm? What the fuck are you talking about? I don’t have any goddamn earworm. Look, I’m sorry, don’t mean to be—it’s nothing personal, nothing between you and me. I got a family, please, I got a family.”

Something in Nat felt the need for justification. How many homes of the wealthy had he entered in the last days, weeks, months? Each of them had been connected to head-splitting violence that had happened in front of him, that cut into his sleep and made him think of prison when he was awake. He’d invaded the homes of the wealthy because there was a weight on his chest that made breathing a chore. The man in front of him was part of that weight, wasn’t he? So what if he had a family? Everyone has a family: a mother and a father and all the subsequent connections.