Firebreak Read online

  “Sure did. It is exactly as laggy and awkward as you’re imagining. Hey, at least nobody’s bombed the library yet. Then I’d really be in trouble.”

  “So wait.” I lean forward. “Back at the park. You didn’t have any lenses to take out. You’re locked out. Why wear lenses that don’t interface?”

  A smile tugs up the corner of B’s mouth. “That’s right. I’m still allowed to use public computers, and I can sponsor who I want. I have a job, I have an income. It’s all on the level. But the fact remains I’m on a list, and I figured you didn’t want a whole conversation with a convicted terrorist on record.” She holds up both hands palm out. “Don’t worry, though,” she continues. “Like I said, this place belongs to my sister. Nobody’s listening.”

  I mentally probe this, rolling it around and around in my head, trying to gauge my level of shock and upset at what B’s said. Minimal, honestly. I’d probably run out of fingers before I listed all the people I’ve known who’ve gone down on terrorism charges at one time or another. The water bottle guy, sure, but also a family at the school who was recycling their wastewater, a woman who hacked her water account to get into rationing lines at three different buildings, a group of teenagers who were filtering and selling river water, a couple who straight-up rolled a keg off a ration truck, that kind of thing. I bet on the Greenleaf Industries side of the city they bust you for keeping a garden instead. Keisha’s sprout jars would probably be enough to put her away.

  Periodically, Suresh and Keisha and Tegan will get drunk and take their lenses out and have this big whispered cooperative rant about the merits of a corporation that supplies neonatal brain implants and interfaced lenses for free but charges more for water than most people can begin to afford. “They position themselves as gatekeepers for this whole world,” Keisha will say, tapping her forehead like she can touch the implant through her skull and two inches of brain tissue.

  “And they lock people out of it for being thirsty,” Suresh will add. “When they’re the ones keeping the water, too.”

  “So have a march or something,” Talya told them once, and Tegan rounded on her.

  “A march. And that would accomplish what exactly? They’d blockade us in the street and jack up the price on the water they sell us. Think about it. This is the same company that owns the record labels that sign the artists that write the resistance songs. Protest as a form of war profiteering. They love every minute of it.”

  I realize Jessa is looking to me for a reaction. I nod once at B decisively. “We’re good.” But I’m a long way from putting my lenses back in. “Still confused, though. What exactly is this all about?”

  “You know a lot about the SecOps characters in-game,” B says immediately, like she’s been waiting to drop this on us the whole time. “What about the real ones? Where did they come from?”

  This knocks Jessa back a step. Me too, if I’m honest. There’s a trick hidden somewhere in this question, otherwise why would she be asking it? Even though on the face of it the answer is painfully easy. It’s as if B asked us why trees are green, or why this city was built, or why it’s Tuesday.

  “Stellaxis made them,” I say slowly, trying not to let my impatience show. “The SecOps program. They’re synthetic humans, they’re weapons, they grew them in a lab somewh—”

  “No,” B says. “They didn’t.”

  Something happens to her voice when she says this. It makes me think of movies, how you have this perfectly still body of water that gives this single ominous ripple that promises that within the next five minutes, somebody’s getting dragged in to die.

  A red leather wallet has appeared on the table where B’s muffin used to be. She’s opening it up and turning it toward us to show us an actual printed paper photo behind clear plastic. Old-school indeed.

  B waits wordlessly as Jessa and I lean in.

  The girl in the photo is maybe seven years old. She’s on the roof of what’s probably an apartment building, somewhere in the north end of the city. In the background you can just make out the Monument, glinting silver in the sun. It’s not a snowman the girl is posed next to, but something like it. A snow… dog, maybe? Something she’s built and is in the process of being photographed next to. She’s wearing a blue snowsuit and no hat. There’s snow melting in her hair. She’s grinning, but that’s for the camera. There’s something else entirely in her eyes.

  “I took this picture almost thirteen years ago,” B says quietly. She taps the girl’s forehead, just above the left eyebrow, where a glaring white strip of smart bandage catches the camera flash like a bike reflector. “I was babysitting while her parents were at work. She was so excited to get out in the snow that she tripped coming out onto the roof and fell on the edge of the snow shovel she was carrying. Gashed her forehead open. Bled like you wouldn’t believe. I asked her if she wanted to stay in and watch cartoons, but she said no, so I put this bandage on her and she ran straight back outside. It’s the only picture I have left of her. The only proof I have that she even existed.”

  B’s hands have taken to swirling her coffee absently, round and round. I glance into the cup. It’s empty.

  “The next summer this building was gone,” she says. “Dropped into the street by some mech gunner’s bad aim. The warnings always say to stay inside when the fighting reaches your street, but what they don’t tell you is that a direct hit from a plasma cannon will bring a thirty-story building down like a house of cards, and that everyone in it dies anyway. At least, almost everyone.”

  Her gaze sweeps upward and pans back and forth between Jessa and me, expectant. I have no idea what she wants, so I nod. This seems to disappoint her.

  “You have to give them credit,” she says. “They were careful. They must have picked them up from hospitals or shelters or something. Little kids who had no families left. Nobody to know or even suspect they might be still alive.” She chuckles a little to herself, humorlessly. “What they didn’t count on was the fucking babysitter.”

  This monologue isn’t really giving us anything else to work with. We’re both frozen, staring, essaying polite nods like we have the first faintest clue what she’s talking about.

  B’s disappointment visibly deepens. I begin to kiss my five gallons a week goodbye.

  “Do you remember when the operatives became overnight celebrities?” B asks abruptly. “The company started making all the t-shirts and posters and soda flavors and action figures, and put their virtual analogues into the game?”

  Relief radiates off Jessa as she finds her path again. “Sure,” she says, sketching a fake-casual shrug that almost sends her elbow into my side, she’s that tense. “About eight years ago. When they came out of their growth tanks and passed quality control and were sent out to the front to fight for our economic freedom. The action figures and stuff came first, though. Almost immediately, really. The game wasn’t until a few years later. And it wasn’t just a case of putting the operatives in. The game already existed. They designed the whole war module. There are I don’t know how many of them in BestLife. Modules, I mean.”

  “A bunch,” I say.

  Jessa nods. “I want to say at least a dozen? There’s a space one, a fantasy thing with dragons, a time travel one, I think? The war module is just one of them. That’s where the SecOps NPCs live.”

  Then, a smidge defensively to my ears, she doubles back. “Yes, okay, the marketing stuff looks tacky, but it’s genius if you think about it. It makes people care, you know? People like to feel involved. This makes them feel like what they’re doing is, I don’t know, relevant somehow.”

  “By buying t-shirts,” I say dryly. I know it’s not the time or place, but this is a long-standing thing between us, and it’s out before I can stop it.

  “By taking an interest,” Jessa sniffs. “Lack of complacency is a political statement.”

  “Collect soda cups to support the war, that kind of thing?”

  “Please. It’s not like you don’t—”


  “Growth tanks,” B echoes, like we haven’t moved off on this whole other stupid tangent by now. “It’s amazing what total media consensus will make people believe.”

  We look at her. She’s gazing down at her picture of this random girl. We wait for her to say something else, but she’s gone quiet. Sad because this girl died, I guess. I mean, it is sad, but honestly, who doesn’t have a story like that? My whole family died in this war. And Jessa’s and Keisha’s and Jackson’s and everyone’s. And no amount of t-shirts and action figures is going to bring them back.

  B is sliding a second photo out from behind this one. Concealing it in her hand like a card trick.

  “When they brought the operatives out of the Stellaxis labs,” she says softly, “I heard about it vaguely on some newsfeed. I was walking down the street when the first headlines broke. I only really paid half attention to the news clip. A superweapon that could stand up to Greenleaf Industries’ infiltrator mechs and resonator ordnance and mantis drones, really turn the war around.”

  This time she goes quiet long enough that Jessa leans in and touches B’s arm gently. “And?”

  “And. And then I saw the ads. They were everywhere. All of a sudden. I don’t know where they came from so fast. Within an hour they were on every display. Every billboard, every taxi, embedded into every article on my newsfeed. I didn’t look too closely at them at first. And then when I did, at first I didn’t believe what I was seeing.”

  “That they looked like kids?” Jessa supplies, nodding knowingly. “I remember there being a lot of debate about that at first, but it settled down after—”

  “No. Not that they looked like kids. That they were kids. That Stellaxis Innovations was lying through its teeth about where they came from. The operatives didn’t come out of any growth tanks. They were stolen. They were orphaned and vulnerable and had no families left to look for them, and so Stellaxis took them and put them in their labs for years and changed them. Turned them into tools to fight their corporate war. Until it killed them. One by one by one.”

  “Wait,” Jessa says. “What? That’s not—”

  B doesn’t seem to hear her. “They’re celebrities, but we don’t know anything about them. Height, weight, blood type. Those are collector-card stats, not information. Nobody knows these people. They don’t have friends or families to go home to—hell, they don’t have homes. They live in Stellaxis HQ. We get the version of events Stellaxis feeds us. Online profiles and news clips and airbrushed posters and I bet you know someone who has a story about seeing 33 up close at some checkpoint or 06 pulling some civilians out of some wreckage, but that’s it. Everything about them—everything that matters—is classified. They’re somebody’s lab project. And we don’t even know what they called that project, back when it was an experiment not yet ready to be announced to the world as the wildly successful, tide-changing, table-turning, war-winning Stellaxis StelTech SecOps program.” B does something annoyed with her eyebrows. “Some stupid name, probably, if historical precedent is any kind of indication.”

  She’s lost me, but I don’t dare admit it. I nod like I understand. Beside me, Jessa is doing the same. A moment passes while B fidgets with the photo in her hand, cupping it like if she held it to her ear she’d hear the ocean.

  “What kind of celebrity is kept that locked down? They live in that lab. They come out and fight, they go back in. Rinse, repeat. We get the news footage of them working, we get the announcements when they achieve some kind of victory, we get a remembrance flare when one dies. Sometimes, here in the city, you’ll see them out there fighting—” here Jessa perks up and is met by the wall of B’s gaze—“but if you’re close enough to get a good look at that, you’ve probably got bigger problems. The collateral damage projections in their typical workplace environment are, shall we say, not encouraging. But for the most part, the only versions of the operatives we have easy access to are the in-game analogues.”

  Whatever rail her train of thought is barreling down, I can’t see where it’s headed. Glimpses of the photo make it through her caged fingers. B catches me looking, raises her hand a little. Does not open it.

  “So I went home that day and I dug this old picture out of storage, and I ran it through one of those extrapolator apps that shows you what you’ll look like when you’re old, or what your new baby will look like as an adult, or…” She trails off. “I guess part of the reason I approached you two is that you remind me of her. I looked you up after watching your stream.” So much for no real names, I think. “She’d look a little like you now, and she’d be pretty much exactly your age if…” B gives us a once-over. “Nineteen? Twenty?”

  We nod.

  “Well. This is about as old as she got.”

  B opens her hand.

  The other picture is of a girl maybe fifteen years old. She’s got slightly wide-set eyes, roundish cheeks, raised eyebrows, lifted chin. She looks like she’s just asked us a question and is waiting with a dwindling supply of patience for our answer.

  The app has erased her grin and replaced it with a neutral closed mouth, deleted the smart bandage, and given her a scar in its place. Thick brown hair falls heavily past her shoulders.

  I swallow. The app has messed up the hairstyle, but as for the rest—

  “That’s 05,” Jessa says, and her tone is a perfect distillation of my thoughts. She blinks across the table at B in confusion.

  “No,” B replies evenly, and I realize I’ve been utterly misreading the quiet in her tone. It’s not shyness or nerves or worry or even sadness. It’s anger, curled and ready like a fist. “That’s Elena.”

  0005

  IT’S ANOTHER TWO HOURS BEFORE JESSA AND I are home. We say nothing of the meeting the whole way back to the car (which has reappeared exactly where we left it earlier) or on the long ride back through the darkening winter afternoon to the hotel. It’s not a taxi, but that’s no guarantee the car isn’t recording. I have no intention of reinserting my lenses until I’m back in my own space, around people I can trust. Not that I plan to relay to them everything I’ve just been told, either. The basics will do just fine. New sponsor. Weekly swipes to our water accounts. We’ll do something to celebrate, probably, like always when someone in our room picks up a sweet gig. Get some snacks from the company store, a few buckets of soda, and put on a movie. Nothing big. We all have to get up early tomorrow anyway. New job and all.

  Not that we’ve been asked to do anything illegal, anything that will land us on a lockout list like B. Just… keep doing what we’re doing, basically. Same stuff, better pay. And the one condition: we get as much detailed footage of as many operatives as possible. Get right up in their faces. Look for distinguishing marks like 05’s—Elena’s—scar. While B, from her library or wherever, collects screenshots. Takes notes. For some reason I picture her tacking all these up on the walls wherever she lives, running strings between pushpins like she’s living in some old crime movie.

  We’re just doing what we always do, I remind myself. She’s just a sponsor. She’s paying us to play the game. Whatever she does with our streamed footage is her business. We don’t have to meet with her again. We play the game. We run our stream. We collect our water. That’s all.

  If I thought about it, I might be insulted that B knew she could buy us that easily. Small-time streamers who have to hold down four jobs and wait nicely in line for their daily water rations like good patriotic customer-citizens. But a job’s a job, and water’s water, and I’m reasonably sure B’s weird suspicions aren’t anything that can incriminate us if she decides to go off the deep end somehow. We’re just playing the game.

  On that long quiet ride home, I go over bits of the meeting in my mind.

  After showing us the photo of Elena, she gave us an envelope. When we opened it, I began to understand more than ever why she wanted to meet in person. It wasn’t the sort of thing I’d email someone over trackable channels.

  It was a list of names. Descriptions. Ag
es, all varying between seven and nine. Identifying marks. A few sketches of faces done with varying levels of artistic ability. Only a couple of photos, both untouched and run through the same aging-extrapolator app, then printed. Neither looks like any of the SecOps faces in the ads. In the news. In the game.

  “Who would have photos of these kids?” B said when I asked. “Their families are gone. Most of the schools were destroyed. They have nobody to look for them, to even know there’s someone there to look for. As far as the system’s concerned, they’re ghosts. These—” pointing to the couple of photos—“are the exception, not the rule. Situations like mine. The Martinez family—Elena’s family—was close with ours. That’s how I kept getting roped into babysitting. But for every twenty-thirty vaporized families, there’s maybe one school bus driver or librarian or friend of a friend of a friend who’s alive.” She tapped the list without looking at it, somewhere between girl, age 8, dark skin/brown eyes/black hair, bitten nails, mild eczema and boy, age 7, light skin/blue eyes/red hair, scar on right knee (bicycle accident). “And remembers.”

  Something shifted at that, way in the back of my mind. Whatever this was, it wasn’t just B and her family. What I was walking into was a full-on conspiracy theory. In which I was being invited to take part. The kids on this list could be bones under a ruined high-rise. They could have been on one of the airplanes Greenleaf shot down into the sea. They could be anywhere.

  I looked again at the two extrapolated photos. They could have been anyone. But they looked nothing like any of the twelve SecOps operatives. Of course they didn’t. Thousands and thousands of children have died in this war. To expect those faces to match up with the ones in the newsfeeds was the worst kind of wishful thinking. Making up part of a collateral damage tally is way less glamorous than being kidnapped and secretly turned into a superhero or whatever it is B thinks happened to this kid, but believe me, it’s the only option pretty much any of us are going to get.

  “Why wouldn’t they remove those things for the in-game analogues?” I asked, shitty stand-in though it was for all my other questions. “Distinguishing marks like Elena’s scar. If you’re right, and the real-life operatives were stolen as kids, why give people ways to identify them now? Wouldn’t that just be asking for trouble?”