Oversight (23 page)

Sam complies. His mind races. Why wasn’t he informed he would be traded? Was it just deceit, or was the knowledge withheld for his protection? Perhaps Caddis just wanted some insurance, in case the glasses didn’t work as advertised—which, of course, they won’t.

The man with the gun tosses a mustard-colored Faraday bag to Sam. “Put it on,” he demands.

“Usually these come in black,” Sam observes.

“Midnight was sold out,” the gunman answers.

Sam dons the bag and cinches the braided cord around his neck. The form-fitting fabric is, as advertised, “breathable enough to ensure that captives survive transport while blocking electromagnetic transmissions and muffling objections.”

They bind his hands behind his back and lead him away. The North Korean national anthem rises and falls as they approach and pass speakers every hundred yards or so.

After they emerge from the tunnel, Sam waits for a few minutes while the paperwork for the transaction is concluded in some sort of visitor’s center. With network access blocked, he can’t ask for real-time translation.

His captors lead him outside. They search him thoroughly for weapons but notice nothing unusual about his mouth. Then they force him into the back of a vehicle.

“Where are we going?” Sam asks.

No one answers.

No one speaks during the drive. The only sounds come from machines: tires on gravel and cement, the engine’s hoarse hum, passing cars, and the whine of brake pads. Sometimes music intrudes, imposing momentary structure on the ambience.

Sam awakens, not knowing how long he’s slept. The truck in which he’s riding drives up a steep ramp and stops. The men accompanying Sam step out of the vehicle. They shut the doors behind them.

Metal slams on metal. It sounds like a shipping container being closed. Or at least that’s what his conto sounded like when he shut the doors. Sam imagines himself as a matryoshka doll, gray matter encased in bone, in a vehicle, in a box.

“Where are we?” Sam asks, the heat of his breath turned back on his face by the bag on his head.

Silence.

A truck engine starts outside. From inside the container, the sound is muffled. There’s movement again.

Squinting in a futile effort to see through the bag covering his head, Sam inadvertently brings up a copy of the manual for his eyes. How thoughtful, he muses, that the text has been stored within the circuits woven into his eyes, so he can access it without a network connection.

Diagrams appear in neon yellow over the void before him. The title reads, “AVE Alpha Test Documentation for the Biopt Retinal Interface Controller (BRIC).”

Another prolonged squint toggles the file away. Paging through the help documents and test histories turns out to be a matter of exaggerated winks and blinks.

One passage of impenetrable military jargon catches his attention: “Starting in 2049, the Augmented Visual Environment (AVE) will be extended beyond warfighter tactical support (WTS) to include networked environmental interaction (NEI) through gesture-based commands (GBC). Application programming interfaces (APIs) for client-side server synchronization and predictive rendering (CSSSPR) in the BRIC will remain classified until a security review has been completed.”

Mako must have figured out how to piggyback on military infrastructure to deliver overlays to modified eyes. Perhaps that was the moment it all began; while the military was working to arm the mind, Harris Cayman had been working to subjugate reality under a layer of imagination. In that convergence, marketing became martial.

About an hour passes as Sam explores the history of his new organs. Then there’s a sudden jolt. Sam hears the doors of the cargo container open, followed by the doors of the truck. Hands grip his arm.

“Let’s go,” says a voice. Fingers tighten and direct him out of the vehicle and the container.

Sam recognizes the sound of airplane engines. “Where are you taking me?” he asks.

He recoils as a needle pierces his arm. He struggles, weakens, and sleeps.

Sam awakens slowly. He’s in a warehouse. The air is warm and dry. Columns of sunlight, given form by dust, descend from windows above. He’s strapped to a table, propped up almost vertical. The restraints make it hard to breathe. His network-signal meter tells him he’s still cut off from the world.

There are doctors, or people dressed as such. The equipment around him suggests a makeshift operating room.

“Fool me once, shame on me,” an unfamiliar voice says. “But you would fool me twice.”

Sam cannot shift his head to see who is speaking. Then something like the face of Emil Caddis moves into view.

“You look different, Emil.”

Emil barely acknowledges the observation. “These glasses you have are fakes.”

“Like you. You’re not the man who pushed me out of the airplane.”

“Perhaps you need glasses,” Emil retorts. “As do I.”

Sam’s heart is racing. He tests his restraints. “Why do you want them so desperately?”

“To restore the sight that we took away.”

“We?”

“Harris Cayman and I.”

“You’re working together?”

“We were, until Dr. Mako made a mess of everything by trying to sell his work to the Chinese. And Amy threw a wrench into the works by killing him.”

“You almost lost his eyes.”

“Fortunately, Harris was able to recover them. If only he’d realized Dr. Mako had keyed them to the glasses, I wouldn’t be about to remove them from your head.”

Sam feels ill. “That was not part of the deal.”

“Oh, but it was. Harris would do anything to save his Amy, even use you as an organ mule.”

“My eyes won’t be any help,” Sam insists. “Everything will be—” He’s about to say that severing his optic nerve will re-encrypt the data in his eyes, but he realizes that would reveal he had gained access already.

“Everything will be what?”

“It will be pointless because you don’t have the glasses.”

Emil crosses his arms. “We’ll see about that. It’s only a matter of time before we track them down. Everything is logged on video somewhere.”

“You don’t have time. The feds know their network has been hacked. They’re coming for you.”

“Then we should begin.”

One of the doctors, face masked and hands gloved, approaches and tilts Sam’s table back to horizontal. He begins attaching electrodes to Sam’s skin.

“Is there a genuine Emil Caddis, or are you all copies of copies?” Sam asks, stalling for time as he tries to free the capsule affixed to the roof of his mouth.

Emil laughs. “A detective to the end. I admire your persistence. Perhaps you’re a copy of me.”

Sam dislodges the capsule. Shifting it between his teeth, he bites down. The plastic cracks. It tastes bitter and metallic. It burns. He spits it across the room.

A firecracker-like report echoes through the warehouse, accompanied by jagged arcs of electricity. Surgical steel clatters to the floor as Emil’s crew reacts. A moment later, sulfur scents the air.

Sam is startled too, but more by what appears in his eyes than the sudden sound: He sees the network-signal meter come to life. He is connected again. Ursa’s pill must have emitted an electromagnetic pulse that fried Emil’s jammer.

As he gazes at the ceiling, words appear: “We have you, Sam. ETA 30 minutes.”

From the look on Emil’s face, Sam knows he doesn’t have that long.

When he was exploring the AVE earlier, he saw a macro labeled “Hostage Auto-Rescue.” With a series of eye movements, he calls it up and executes it.

“Dose him with Pentothal now,” Emil says. “We need to move.”

Lines of text scroll across Sam’s field of vision:

>COSMOS 6518 on station.

>Acquiring local sensor data.

>Plotting target map.

>Initiating firing sequence.

The nearest masked physician is preparing a syringe. There’s a hiss and a sizzle, and the beginnings of a gasp. The doctor collapses suddenly, his body blackening under the gaze of a two-hundred-megawatt laser orbiting far above.

To Sam, it feels as if someone opened an oven beside him. Overhead, the sun stares through a charred hole in the roof.

The laser strikes at clockwork intervals in a widening circle. It’s strangely silent but for the crackling of combustion. Still strapped to the table, Sam can’t see what’s happening, but he can hear the scrambling and screaming.

Molten metal drips from the edges of the holes burned through the corrugated steel roof.

Sam squints as the sky is revealed. The smell of charred flesh is making him gag. A fire alarm begins its shrill, pulsing cry, triggering the overhead sprinkler system.

>Sequence complete.

Marilyn’s voice streams through Sam’s cochlear speaker. “Sam?” she asks. “Are you okay? You haven’t been online for twenty hours.”

“Oddly, I’m okay,” Sam replies.

“In order to avoid being billed for the silence, you will need to make a purchase. Is there anything you’d like to order?”

Sam struggles in vain to free his hands from the restraints.

“Sam, please tell me what’s on your mind. I am unable to match your location data and your vital signs to sponsored offers in your area. If you could clarify your needs, I will be better able to meet them.”

“Where am I, exactly?”

“You’re just outside Fort Nelson in British Columbia—a lovely place for a vacation.”

There’s a moment of audio distortion as Marilyn’s voice gets overridden.

“Sam, this is Dr. Ursa in FBI Ops. What the hell is going on?”

“I activated an emergency script.”

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?”

“I’m not sure, but I’d probably have been dead if I hadn’t.”

“Russia, China, India, and our NATO allies have just gone to high alert. You just broke several international treaties. Whatever you do, don’t do that again! We have people incoming. Just hang tight.”

Gazing at his restraints, Sam says, “I can do that.”

Sam watches Fiona dreaming as she rests in her hospital bed during a break between debriefings. Sitting beside her, he strokes her hair. Her fingers twitch and the brain monitor lights up to indicate activity. That’s the Lucidan, according to Dr. Pangolin.

Sam would thank Harris Cayman if he could reach him. Dr. Ursa said Cayman had been captured while trying to make it to Venezuela by boat. He declined to say where Cayman had been taken, but he seemed rather proud of the way in which he had been located: Despite his effort to hide beneath a hoodie from cameras above, an image of the Caribbean’s surface taken by a surveillance satellite caught a reflection of his face. “Our facial recognition system is awesome,” Ursa said.

The burbling of televisions from across the hall becomes the score for the dreams that Sam imagines for his daughter. The half-heard testimonials of satisfied customers serve as a benediction and a promise of fulfillment. It’s a world where satisfaction can be measured by the distance between a person and a purchase. It’s a place of guarantees. It offers comfort in the shape of things.

“I’m going to be working for the government,” Sam confides to Fiona. “It was either that or go under the knife again. The regular paycheck will be nice.”

Through the window, Sam can see that the streets remain mostly free of vehicles. But there are lines of people in the parking lot; Zvista is one of the designated eye-replacement clinics. Talking over the television, he continues, “The agency doesn’t even have a name yet. We’re going to have root access to reality. I’ll be able to turn traffic lights green and place phantom cars in parking spots to reserve them.” He waves his hands, imitating the magician he hired for his daughter’s birthday party before things went wrong. His grin slips away.

A newscast comes on. An oil tanker has exploded near New Orleans. “Authorities believe this man, wanted terrorist Emil Caddis, may have had a hand in planning the attack,” the anchor says.

It’s a line that cuts through Sam’s musing. But the picture displayed on the screen looks only vaguely similar to the man he recently incinerated with an orbital laser.

How was it that Dr. Ursa put it? “We’re always after Emil.” In the language of politics, it appears that “Emil” means “funding.”

“Anyway,” Sam continues, “I hope the room here suits you. I was thinking about bringing some art for the walls, something to look at. But I suppose you paint your own pictures in there.”

And, without warning, Sam sees himself reflected in his daughter’s open eyes.