Pennsylvania Omnibus (18 page)

Jed awoke upon a firm and thin
mattress in a darkened room. The only light came in through a small square
window on a door that was six or seven feet away from the bed. As his eyes
slowly adapted to the darkness, he could make out that he was in some kind of
cell. He was still wearing his Amish clothing—his broadfall pants, long-sleeved
white shirt, suspenders, black boots—and his hat was near him on the bed. His
hands and feet were no longer bound. He sat up on the bed, and as he did so a
light came on in the room and some music started to play from somewhere. Soft
piano music with no lyrics. He was trying to gather his mind and to get his
thoughts in order when he heard a buzz, and the sound of air… like when an air
compressor on one of his more liberal neighbors’ farms was being voided of its
compressed contents. He looked up, and from a crevice in the brick walls of his
cell he saw a mist descending on him. It smelled like orange zest, and his mind
zoomed back to the time when he was interrogated by Hugh Conrad in the
Transport Security office and a canister had sprayed into the room, releasing
that very same smell.

The scent relaxed him, and he leaned
back on the bed and felt his vision go still and black. Once again the white
screen appeared before him, and he felt like he was standing in front of it.
The screen expanded until it wrapped all the way around him and over him, and
on the screen a farm appeared. It was his farm, and he was standing in the
paddock next to the milk barn, and Zoe walked up to him and reached toward him
with her nose. She was hoping he had some sweet treat, some cow cubes perhaps,
to give her. When he touched her nose she realized that he didn’t have anything
for her to eat, so she turned away, uninterested, and sauntered across the
green grass of the paddock, her empty udder swinging with each step.

This time it was more real. Well… it
felt
real. There was still just the slightest hint of that sense of
everything being
too
perfect, but for some reason Jed’s mind was now
taking over and fixing the “too-right” things that should have been “wrong.”
His brain roughed up the image until he agreed to be convinced that what he was
experiencing was real. He looked up into the clouds and he could see the three
dimensional wispiness that modern artists never seem to get right. (He’d seen
art before, in school, or on trips to town with his father.) He looked toward
the road, and his attention fell on a mud hollow the pigs had dug out while
rooting. A recent rain had filled the little hollow with muddy water. 

Jed turned and saw the barn. That
beautiful, glorious structure that held so much meaning for him. His eyes
tracked upward and he saw the place where the special window should have been
in the gabled end of the uppermost peak of the barn. The window—frame and
all—was missing. He looked back down, and at the base of the barn he saw a set
of hay hooks he’d dropped there on the day he’d left for New Pennsylvania. He’d
forgotten to put the hooks back in the barn—and there they were. Still there.
The hay hooks were a detail, one of a thousand that convinced him the vision
was real, not something concocted in order to trick him. Then he looked toward
the house.

And he saw Dawn.

So beautiful
. He heard the thought, and it
embarrassed him.

She was standing only ten feet from
him, and she was the most captivating thing he’d ever seen in his life.
Everything about her was perfect, and she was smiling. Only, there was a
sadness in her smile even though she looked authentically happy to see him. And
she was dressed Amish, with cape and white apron and a white kapp with the ties
hanging down.

He felt ashamed because a part of
him knew that this
wasn’t
real, it couldn’t be, and that Dawn hadn’t
consented to be seen this way. His mind—just below his consciousness, but still
invading it—noted the irony of a man feeling shame for imagining a woman in
modest, plain, and unrevealing dress. But a fantasy is a fantasy, isn’t it? It
cannot be right. His face flushed red, and Dawn saw it.

She looked down at herself and
smiled back at him. “Don’t be surprised, Jed. I really like these clothes. I
love being dressed like this. It’s beautiful.”

Jed shook his head. “Only it’s not
you
saying that. It’s all in my mind. It’s what I would want you to
say.”

“You’re wrong, Jed.”

Jed looked around. “So is this
heaven? Were we killed?”

Dawn shook her head, and the sadness
in her eyes multiplied. “No.”

Jed reached down and picked a piece
of grass, then put it in his mouth. He chewed it and tasted its sweetness. He
could feel the fibers on his tongue.

“Are you sure this isn’t heaven?” he
said.

“I’m sure, Jed. In fact, this is a
whole lot more likely to be hell.”

Jed and Dawn walked toward the
house, and as they walked Dawn took his hand in hers. At the house, they sat on
the porch in wooden chairs that his father had made in his workshop using only
hand tools. His parents were nowhere around. He didn’t feel an urge to look
around for them, because some part of him was still telling him that what he
was seeing wasn’t the real world. A gentle breeze touched his hair, and he felt
it this time, like the wispy fingers of evening and history. He removed his
hat, and he smiled when he heard the familiar creak of the porch as he pushed
his legs out and crossed his boots.

Glancing again at Dawn, he almost
couldn’t stand to look upon her for fear that his heart would jump out of his
chest, and because he thought that if she caught him looking she would read his
thoughts. She was so stunning in her Amish dress that he had trouble
controlling his breathing. He looked away rather than stare at her. “If this is
hell,” he said, “and I know it might be blasphemous… but...”

Dawn flinched and interrupted him
with an upraised hand. “We can’t stay here. It’s not real, Jed.” She pointed
out across the farm. “This is all a lie.”

“But you said you were
real.”

She grabbed his hand in hers and
looked into his eyes. “
I’m
real, Jed, but this place is not. Transport
Intelligence put a BICE unit in your head. In mine, too. I’m back online. And
they have you on Quadrille—we call it
Q
—so that your mind will more
easily accept the transplant… and believe the things you see and hear while
they’re trying to reprogram you.”

Though he tried so hard not to, he
found himself staring at Dawn’s face. It was so
right
that he wanted to
kiss her. He didn’t want to talk at all. But then he knew it would be wrong to
kiss her, so he tried to focus on what she was saying. “If this isn’t real—”
But I know it isn’t real.
“If this isn’t real, then why are they letting
you tell me this? Don’t they control the computers? Aren’t they listening to us
right now?”

Dawn smiled. “Well, they don’t know
that TRACE has back doors, shells, and traps throughout their system. We’ve
been infiltrating their programming for years, and there’s been nothing they
could do about it. It’s a byproduct of a technological ecosystem: any system
that relies on creative people to keep it running is going to be riddled with
secrets and back doors. Most of the programmers who designed the BICE and
integrated it with the Internet had hacker and rebel tendencies. Those people
always
do, God bless them. It’s always been that way and it always
will
be that way. There was no way to keep us out. That’s how the SOMA
got in touch with me through my BICE when you were checking in at customs, back
when I first met you.”

Dawn was holding Jed’s hand now, and
she gave it a squeeze. He took it as a recognition of their shared adventure
since that day, and how much they’d been through together.

She lifted his hand a little and
looked at it closely before giving it another light squeeze. “Part of my job
has been infiltrating Transport protocols and accessing TRACE backdoors to use
the system against them. Right now they think we’re both unconscious and
recovering from the surgery and the drugs they gave us. They know that you’re
slowly adopting the BICE data into your cognitive stream. I have the data
mirrored so they’re seeing what I want them to see. Basically, I’ve hacked your
brain, Jed. And I’ve also communicated to TRACE command everything that’s
happened.”

Jed just stared, unsure what he
should accept and what was still too fantastic to be believed.

“There’s a war going on, Jed. And
right now, one of the battlefields is your mind.”

“I just want to be out of it all. I
just want to be home.”

“There is no out. There is no home.
Unless we win.”

Jed shook his head. “It’s too
much.”

“Listen,” Dawn said, “I don’t expect
you to get all of this at once. It’s a lot to take in, and I understand that.
We’re just lucky they didn’t shoot us back when they captured us just to be
done with you.”

“Blessed,” Jed said.

“What?”

“Not lucky—blessed.”

Dawn shrugged. “All right. Blessed,
then.”

“So what do we do next?”

Dawn stood up and turned to face
him. She reached out with her hands and pulled him up out of his chair. When he
stood, he was uncomfortably close to her, and she didn’t step back to increase
the space between them. She looked up at him as she spoke. “Next? You’re going
to go through all of their training and protocols.” She reached up and fixed a
wisp of hair that had escaped from her kapp. “The system does that
automatically as you sleep, so you won’t really notice it that much. Only
fragments of notable instances here and there will occur to you. Without your
even knowing about it, they’ll train you to use the system, to access
information unconsciously, and they’ll program your BICE to send back
information to Transport Intelligence. You’re going to pretend to go along with
everything they do.”

She gave him a sideways smile, as if
to say
sorry about this part
. “Actually, you won’t have to pretend. My
guess is that they’re going to try to zap your memory of the last few
days—going all the way back to when you first arrived at Transport Customs in
Columbia, before you met me. I don’t know exactly how they’ll do it, but we’ll
soon see. Then they’re going to deliver you to the Amish Zone—exactly as you’d
originally intended before all hell broke loose. They’ll expect that you won’t
know what’s happening, and their plan is for you to serve as an unwitting spy,
gathering data and transmitting it back to Transport.”

Jed noticed that even though he was
now standing, Dawn was still holding both of his hands. He wondered if that was
part of the fantasy that his brain was concocting, or if she was really in
control of what he saw in front of him.

“Why go to all of this trouble just
to spy on the Amish? What harm can the plain people be to Transport?”

Dawn pushed the troublesome strand
of hair back into her head covering and shrugged. “The plain people are never
harmless.”

“But they
are
harmless,” Jed
said. “They’re pacifist. They don’t take sides. They can’t help or hurt
anyone.”

Dawn shook her head again. “Free
people who produce everything they need to survive are never harmless, Jed.
Because they’re not dependent on government—and
that
makes them
dangerous when governments are wicked. Add to that the fact that people on both
sides of this conflict depend on Amish production for food… which means the
plain people are strategically important. And don’t forget that the resistance
is led by a former Amish man.”

“My brother.”

“Yes.”

Jed took a deep breath. “When am I
going to find out about Amos?”

“Soon.”

Jed reached over and touched Dawn’s
sleeve. The green fabric felt cool and very real to him. When he touched her,
she turned to him and smiled.

“Your brother wanted you to see
everything, to experience what’s going on in the Amish Zone and in this world.
He figured that maybe then you would understand his decisions.”

“I don’t understand them.”

“This whole thing,” Dawn said,
“everything going on here… this is not some grand plan to torture you or keep
you in the dark. You don’t think every single one of us in the resistance isn’t
tired of saying ‘Not yet, we can’t tell you yet’? Of course we’d love to have
just told you everything when you first arrived at customs. But then you’d
never understand. You’d be like the elders here in New Pennsylvania—unable and
unwilling to see what’s really happening.”

“The Amish will never change. They
will never fight.”

Dawn smiled. “Your brother knows
that. He doesn’t want them to change or fight. They’re too valuable to this
world and the old world. He wants you to know the truth, so that at least you
can communicate with them and let them know why he’s made the decisions he’s
had to make. Why he’s chosen to fight.”

“I still don’t
understand.”