Glenn Beck - The Eye of Moloch

“Good. It’s for the best.”

“So you’re saying I shouldn’t even stop by and see you again before I go?”

He nodded. “I don’t want you to be in danger, and I hope I get a chance to explain someday.”

• • •

At precisely 7:50 a.m. a perky male junior executive dropped in to accompany him to his rehab work assignment. The man waited outside the room while Noah showered and shaved.

When he finally opened his door to the hall he was provided with one last fashion accessory. The young man who’d been waiting had been joined by a security guard, and together they fitted Noah’s left ankle with an electronic tracking bracelet. It was formfitting enough so one’s socks could be pulled up over it and was otherwise black and featureless, except for an intermittent green light and a yellow Talion logo on its side.

“This is just for your safety,” the young man explained. He fiddled with his smartphone as the guard worked silently, and soon the small screen displayed a page full of data, an up-to-the-second status report on the new subject. “We can tell where you are and how you’re getting along, twenty-four hours a day. Like they say, if you’re not doing anything wrong there’s nothing to be concerned about, right?”

“Absolutely,” Noah said, as he finished replacing his shoe.

“We all have one here. You’ll get used to it before you know it.”

There were a number of moving color-coded lines and bars on the screen, and his escort cheerfully explained the purpose of several of them. Heart rate, stress level, oxygenation, psychogalvanic reflex—a rudimentary lie detector—and a blinking red dot on an overhead map that denoted his location to within a few feet.

“What’s that one?” Noah asked, pointing it out.

“That’s your blood alcohol level.”

“Well. What will they think of next.”

“It’s not that a little drink or two isn’t allowed. A reasonable amount of anything legal is okay. We just wouldn’t want anyone to overdo it. No smoking, of course.”

“Of course.”

On the walk to the place where he’d been assigned to work, his escort gave Noah the guided tour, complete with an approved company line on the purpose and function of the complex. The weasel-worded language required continual mental translation, but this was the gist of it:

Despite the crumbling U.S. economy, money was no object for initiatives such as this. It was only right that the taxpayers should fund it; it was a big part of their future, after all. The place was evolving from the simple information-gathering site and detention center it had once been. It was now to embody the vision of an ideal community, a new approach to the concept of human society: peaceful, sustainable, tightly regulated, and when necessary, enforceable. It was designed to provide a perfectly level (and carbon-neutral) playing field for its residents in every approved aspect of their lives. All were taken care of, and all made their assigned contribution to the common good.

From each according to his abilities, in other words, and to each according to his needs.

The thousands of inhabitants already there were of two distinct types. The staff were only a small percentage of the total population. His guide stumbled a bit with his verbiage when describing the majority. They weren’t prisoners—at least not by the strictest definition. They hadn’t been arrested or charged with any crime and none were represented by counsel or awaiting trial. Still, this didn’t change the fact that none of them could leave. But then again, why should they ever want to?

Of those two available residence classes, Noah’s own new status was apparently yet to be determined.

Their destination was an old and stately five-story building that seemed out of place in its chillier surroundings. Skeletons of new structures were rising on either side but this one, it appeared, was being preserved as it originally stood.

Once inside they took an elevator to the top floor and then proceeded down a long hall with media and research rooms distributed along either side. These rooms were not unlike those in which he’d been forced to toil away when he was confined here before: dry rows and columns of identical desks and gray half-walled cubicles arranged in a highly functional and completely impersonal workspace. The difference now was that these rooms were all unoccupied and they appeared to have lain empty for quite some time.

The door at the far end of the hall had a hand-lettered sign affixed above it that read simply THE FIRST CIRCLE.

When they reached the watercooler the man accompanying Noah pulled him aside and said, “I should warn you about this pair you’ll be working around. Warn is too strong a word; just be aware that they’re likely to seem a little eccentric. When the departments in this building became obsolete these two were the only ones we weren’t able to reassign elsewhere. There are . . . special circumstances with both of them. And with you, too, I guess; that must be why they’ve assigned you here. In any case, if they get to be too much for you just let us know and we’ll try to make other arrangements.”

“Sure thing.”

As they approached, the sounds of a heated conversation were clearly audible. His escort sighed and slid a keycard through a reader and as the lock clicked and he opened the door the bickering within stopped abruptly.

“Noah Gardner,” the man beside him said, “this is Ms. Lana Somin, and that gentleman over at the typewriter is Ira Gershon.” He pronounced the word typewriter as though the presence of such a quaint contraption was a bottomless source of amusement.

Both those names were vaguely familiar. The first thing that struck him about the girl was that she was obviously a minor; she couldn’t have been a day older than fifteen. She was thin as a dime and pale like she’d never seen sunlight, dressed in faded black jeans and a fashionably ripped Wu Tang T-shirt.

The man was a grandfatherly senior citizen, but even at this first impression a boyish spirit seemed to shine through unaffected by his years. It took only a moment to realize how he recognized that face. Ira Gershon had been a longtime local anchor on the television news when Noah had first moved to Manhattan as a boy.

The girl didn’t bother to acknowledge Noah’s existence and she spoke instead to the man standing beside him. “I can’t really handle another day of this old guy,” she said. “I’m gonna do something desperate if you don’t let me out of here.”

“As we discussed,” Noah’s escort said, smoothly ignoring the girl completely, “let me know how it goes today. The front office will be interested to hear how you’re getting along.”

“Wait a minute, what is it I’m supposed to do here?”

“Just come on in and have a chair,” Ira Gershon said. He still had the voice of a man born for broadcast. With the sweeping gesture of a gracious host he directed the new arrival to a nearby desk. “Sit down right here, son. I’m on a bit of a deadline but as soon as I finish up with this copy, we’ll figure it out together.”

Chapter 28

They’d set up a workstation for Noah, and while all office activities were no doubt closely monitored, his access to the Internet didn’t seem to have any obvious restrictions. As the other two returned to their work he performed a few searches to try it out. The first subject was a young woman named Lana Somin.

The term hacker gets tossed around a lot in the media but this girl certainly fit both the original as well as the pop culture definition. Though she’d been given up for adoption at birth, she came from a family of certified geniuses, and her particular gift, as one of her lawyers had put it, was in the field of creative exploration. She was a whiz at breaking into places, digitally speaking, and she did so just to see if she could. After a bit of looking around, without stealing or even disturbing anything, she would promptly back out, cover her tracks, and leave the same way she came in. Her favorite places to go were those massively secure electronic fortresses that held themselves out to be impenetrable.