Do Not Go Quietly Read online

  “I don’t know,” said Carlos slowly. “Her apartment’s pretty small. And you still have to get there.”

  “Please, Carlos. She’ll understand. It’s just for a few months. Once I turn 18, they won’t be able to make me come back.”

  He nodded. “I’ll give you the car keys.” Then, when Erin’s lips twisted, “What’s wrong?”

  Erin’s stomach flopped in complex knots. “I was still hoping you’d come with me,” she admitted, and immediately she regretted saying it. She didn’t want him to feel like he had to do everything for her. “I mean, just to drop me off. Like a road trip.”

  “A road trip,” Carlos repeated softly. “I could tell my parents I’m bringing Sofia the car as a surprise. They know I’ve been fixing it up. That could work.”

  Erin leaned in and kissed him lightly. “Thanks.” All the fear ebbed out of her, and with it, all the nervous energy. She wanted to curl up and sleep for a week.

  Carlos yanked Hailey’s artificial skin out from under the heavy water jugs. “I don’t think we can fix this, though.”

  Despite her exhaustion, Erin began to gather all of Hailey’s bits into a plastic shopping bag. “I don’t care. I’m not leaving her. We’ll do the hard reset. We’ve got the tools. She deserves a fresh start, too.”

  It would take years to learn how to repair and reprogram an android. She would have to study robotics, programming, artificial intelligence. Nothing in Erin’s life had prepared her for such a task, but she would try, because you couldn’t give up on each other. Nobody was disposable. When the dads let you down, you had to be there for the other girls.

  While Carlos steered them onto the freeway, Erin held the shattered wreck of Hailey in the backseat and walked through the reset sequence. Hailey went peaceful again, her broken eye-cams focused on darkness. Her eyes searched the dark for something to worship, and finding nothing, she worshipped the dark instead. In that moment, she was almost human.

  That night, tucked away in a rat-trap motel, skin to skin with her sleeping Carlos, Erin pulled the Gideon Bible from the drawer and fixed the bad advice of poor old Saint Paul:

  sin sexually

  your bodies are temples

  you are your own

  She thought of April, married off and pregnant before she ever tasted adulthood. Of Thomas Flowers, grieving himself to death in the desert while the pale shadow of his daughter watched over him. And Hailey, running the same program, just swapping out the faces. God has a plan for everything, Erin’s dad said. God has a plan for you. Don’t stray from it.

  Stray, Erin decided. Find the strength somewhere. Run far enough to escape, steal away into the forest, and make your own way. Maybe an old car could get you far enough. Maybe the program would break, the wounds heal, the grief scab over.

  Unless they all came full circle in the end, face to face with a Maker with no imagination and no mercy.

  She touched Carlos’s knee beneath the sheets. Something old made entirely new in the course of one night. Start by crossing out all the nots. She uncapped the marker again. She turned to the last pages.

  Blessed are those

  who practice magic arts

  and everyone who loves

  Glossolalia

  by John Hornor Jacobs

  It was the snake, she realized later, that stopped her mother from speaking, stricken, hanging on the sleeve-worn wooden casement, one hand raised in admonition or fear, Ophelia couldn’t tell. She’d found it by the creek, drowsing in the lower branches of a tree, fat and languorous and impacted by sun. It was black-backed, mouth rimmed in white, and stank of dead fish. It came to her, sliding off the branch and into her waiting hands, as easy as prayer.

  That her mother managed to say, “Why you got that thing, ’Phelia?”

  “Revival tonight.”

  “Brother Tom don’t need your help, child. Take that damned thing back to the crick. Or kill it.”

  She shook her head and held up the moccasin.

  “He don’t let no girls take up serpents. Why don’t he let us share faith?”

  “Honey, put that thing down.”

  “It don’t fear me. I aim it no harm.”

  “It might aim you harm. ’Phelia, please.”

  “Why don’t he let us?”

  “Bible says, suffer not a woman to teach. Brother Tom is a godly man, and we’ll take our faith from him.”

  “I love baby Jesus. Why can’t I share faith?”

  Her mother withdrew from the window, into the shadows of the cabin, and after a moment, emerged through the open door. The wind chimes at the porch eave spun, dappling the front of the cabin in points of light.

  “’Phelia, now. You hear me? Put that thing down.”

  It left her hands reluctantly and remained unmoving in the grass.

  “You finish your chores?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then get on inside. I need some help with the biscuits for tonight.”

  She took each step slowly, watching as her mother found a shovel and struck off the snake’s head.

  The tent smelled of tobacco and sweat, cologne and coal dust. Bare bulbs hung from hammer-dimpled timbers, casting long, shifting shadows while a gas-driven genny buzzed outside the tent.

  So much darker and hotter than the pasture it sits in, she thought, holding her father’s rough hand. Why can’t we do this under the stars?

  Revival Supper had been so nice, out there on the cool pasture’s edges with the other children, laughing and running, exploring the neighboring wood, waiting for the clang of the bell to summon them all to the table. She and Momma had made biscuits, and Brother Punkin’s wife slaughtered and fried two chickens. There was a ham and beans and cake. Everyone was happy.

  She’d slipped away from the other children, still exploring the wood’s mulch and rotting floor, and entered the tent, going under the back wall, wriggling under the heavy canvas that smelled of mildew. She stood in the exact center, at the spot where all the timbers joined in the shape of a star at the apex, and Ophelia felt the Spirit wash over her, as if she had fallen into the creek.

  Her father cuffed her ear when she came out.

  “What you doing in there?”

  “Feeling the Spirit.”

  “The Spirit? You’re too cute for your own damned good. Join the other children, now. Supper’ll be soon.”

  But now, the tent was tight, close, not the airy, star-pierced emptiness of earlier. Her father’s hand felt rough and unkind. The tent was loud with prayer.

  “Harken to me! Harken to me,” yelled Brother Tom into a microphone. “Harken to the sweet Pentecost, where all the people of Christ bathe in His blood!”

  An amplified guitar trilled in the background, sounding an up-tempo version of “Blessed Assurance.” The congregation hopped and jittered.

  A man in farm-weathered overalls shuddered and cried out.

  “Jesus’ name! Oh, conshala dekalalla chirrin ollop. Sella olla seekin conshala!”

  Brother Tom wiped at his face with a handkerchief. A thick man, sweat darkened his shirt at the armpits and back. His oil-slick hair had fallen forward in a wild, clotted mess.

  “My brothers and sisters, feel the Spirit move through you. I can feel It in here. I can feel It move among us! Can you feel It?”

  The crowd barked and yelped, phlegmy voices sounding of black-lung. Ophelia’s father tensed and he released her hand. She looked at her mother, then, who had her own hands over her head, as if she had been swept away in a flood, arms raised to grasp for rescue.

  “They shall speak with new tongues, the Bible says!” Brother Tom’s voice cracked as he yelled. “They shall take up serpents! If they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them!”

  Brother Tom waved at his deacon, who presented a wooden box. Opening the top, he withdrew the rattlers, two to a hand.

  Her father began to dance, a curious shifting of weight from foot to foot. Her mother hopped up and down, yelping words un
known to Ophelia.

  “They shall take up serpents! Harken to me, brethen!”

  He raised the snakes toward the wooden star-burst at the tent’s apex. He danced.

  After the snake had struck his neck, he was a long time falling, first lowering his arms and tilting this way and that, a surprised expression on his moon-shaped face. The rattler struck again at his arm, and he dropped the snakes, all of them, both the ones he’d milked earlier of their venom and the one that Ophelia had found in the wood and had come so willing to her grasp.

  She remembered her mother striking off the moccasin’s head, and smiled, watching Brother Tom fall.

  The tent quieted. The snakes remained unmoving on the grass floor of the tent, stirring their rattles lazily, except for one, which slithered over Brother Tom’s inert body, across his face, and into the congregation, which parted for it like a sea before a prophet. The snake came into Ophelia’s hands, willingly, and she raised it over her head while her mother and father and the rest of the crowd gazed on in amazement, and she felt the Spirit fill her like joy, burn upon her tongue like an ember as she began to speak.

  Choose Your Truth

  by Jo Miles

  There had been an uptick in truth.

  Alia’s bosses at Prosperity didn’t expect her to watch the newstories that filled her queue. Her job was to analyze their local mindshare performance, and watching the content only slowed her down. But she watched, anyway. On an encrypted personal connection via her headset, safe from Prosperity’s reach, she tagged each newstory with an extra dimension: true, fake, true. Partially true. Too biased to categorize. Egregiously fake. True.

  Far more true ones than usual.

  Shockingly, true. She lingered over this particular video, frowning, then glanced up and down the long, antiseptic-white office to make sure none of her coworkers were paying attention to her. They were all heads-down at their own screens. She turned back to the offending newstory.

  Three times she watched the execution. A familiar, silver-haired figure stood in the center of a bare concrete room, holding an axe. A real axe, real steel; Alia could tell, though Production had given it an extra gleam to draw the eye. This was the radical group called the Fist. They led a faction that called itself Choose Truth, though every other faction called it Control. Three times she listened while the Fist condemned a citizen for daring to share content that Choose Truth—that Control—had declared contraband. Three times she watched the axe fall, watched the head wobble across the floor before coming to a stop, empty eyes gazing beyond the camera, away from the spreading crimson. A gruesome, old-fashioned punishment, the commentator noted with barely-contained outrage: fitting for an old-fashioned, ruthless, authoritarian faction like Control.

  It can’t be true, Alia thought, but she had no evidence to back that up, nothing beyond the feeling of wrongness in her gut, that crawling, uncomfortable sensation that kept getting worse, not better. Gut feelings could mislead, and she knew better than to trust them. True, true, true. It shouldn’t be true. But if it is, people need to know.

  However many times she watched, she found no signs of fabrication in the footage, nothing worse than light editing and editorializing. She dug her fingers into her hair, forcing herself to breathe.

  True, she decided at last, and with a pang as blunt and final as that axe blow, she pushed the data point out to her network.

  The next newstory cycled up on her screen, and the next, and she no longer watched them. If she reduced the stories to data points and performance metrics, they couldn’t touch her.

  The borders of her console flared orange, jerking back her attention. She hadn’t realized she’d been staring into space. Careless; she could get censured, if someone noticed. All around the office, analysts shoved their active projects aside to respond to the alert, and so did she. A competitor newstory, one that denounced Prosperity, was gaining mindshare at an alarming rate—and it came from Control.

  She had to pull herself together and help coordinate Prosperity’s response.

  Bex knew it would be a bad day the moment the elevator docked and let her into the office. The broad viviglass windows were tinted dark, today, with multicolored graphs and ever-updating mindshare numbers scrolling across, dimming the view of the clouds around them, hiding the grimy city below. The lights overhead emanated that particular blue-white blaze that was supposed to be optimal for inducing creativity under stress, but at this brightness, it made Bex’s brain hurt.

  Her coworkers debated in tense undertones as they converged on the conference room. The prospect of a meeting cheered her—there were usually pastries at morning briefings—but couldn’t overcome the aura of alarm throughout the office.

  “What’s happened?” she asked her boss, Russhel, as he passed.

  He waved at the wall, and her eyes finally focused on the lines that danced across the display. Most of the colors ticked up and down incrementally. Normal stuff. A couple, including Guardian’s electric green, edged upward, which wasn’t good. But one line, gleaming gold, dropped like a hacked aircar.

  Five points. A five-point drop, overnight, put Prosperity below Guardian, below the Salazar Imperium, below Apiary and even Optimal Frontiers. In one night, they’d lost their lead in mindshare.

  “Oh, shit.”

  “No kidding,” Russhel said. “Get to the briefing and pay close attention. The execs are counting on us for idea-gen on countermeasures.” He lowered his voice to a kind, conspiratorial tone. “Crisis means opportunity, Bex. I know you’ve got big ambitions in this place. Anyone who contributes to pulling us out of this mess, even an intern, will get noticed.”

  “Thanks, boss.” She smiled politely. He liked when she called him boss and made him feel like he wasn’t at the bottom of the department hierarchy. Was this weird little pep talk about boosting his ego? Or was he actually trying to be supportive?

  It wasn’t until he’d dashed off that a third possibility occurred to her: the situation was so bad that they would take ideas from anyone. Even her.

  Alia struggled to organize her thoughts while she waited for staff to gather. Usually it was easy to keep the narratives straight in her head, but not today. The ideation team interns descended on the tray of pastries, eager to supplement their daily ration bars, and Alia wished the permanent staff would dig in, too. If they were eating, they wouldn’t pay as much attention to her briefing.

  She set a croissant on her own plate, for show, but didn’t eat. She never broke bread with her Prosperity coworkers if she could help it, and didn’t think she could choke down a bite of the flaky pastry. Her throat was so dry.

  She couldn’t afford to make mistakes, not even in a briefing of the junior ideation staff. Control is aligned with Guardian, she reminded herself. This newstory supports Guardian’s narrative. That’s our analysis. That’s all that matters. Not a silver-haired rebel and a spreading pool of blood. She banished the images from her mind as she would if they were fake, even though they weren’t fake.

  “You’ve all heard about today’s threat,” she began, and the room fell quiet. “It’s a low-production, implicit-narrative video depicting violent action by Prosperity against a group of striking factory workers at the tier-one factory in Bethesda. An unusually bold narrative, even for Choose—ah, for Control, who released it.”

  Get it together, Alia. Focus. She’d never felt this off-balance at the office before. Any other day, she’d have gone home to wait until she calmed down rather than risk making mistakes, but that wasn’t an option today.

  Alia couldn’t show them the video of Prosperity security applying electroshock after electroshock in wide beams against their striking workers, waiting until they struggled to their feet before initiating the next burst. She couldn’t reveal that she’d watched it herself. Only the Narrative Analysis team had the conditioning to watch oppositional content without damaging effect, and her role was supposed to be limited to infoflow analysis. She didn’t need to see this newst
ory to analyze how it spread, like the Ephresian flu in a slum in high summer.

  She’d wanted to join Narrative Analysis, originally, but Lumi hadn’t approved. They’d worried about how the conditioning might interact with her curator training, a gift too valuable to risk.

  It had been a valid concern.

  “I heard the production quality is really low, like, appallingly low,” someone said. “It sounds like an unsubtle hack job. Why would Guardian back content like that?”

  “And why would anyone share some piece of low-res inflammatory garbage?” asked one of the supervisors with overwhelming authority, as if he knew any more about it than the others. “It breaks all the rules of narrative conveyance.”

  “It’s low-res because of—” Alia caught herself, heart pounding in her ears. She’d been about to say, because of the distance, it’s hard to get quality footage from a rooftop a kilometer away. This was bad. She shouldn’t be here. She needed space to get herself together. “Because, we think, they’re experimenting with new narrative design theories.” She glanced at her notes to make quite sure she had the right language. “Reviving archaic tactics with a new spin. Consumers are used to highly-produced videos. This is something new, and consumers share what’s new.”

  “They’ve stolen an awful lot of our mindshare for Guardian, and a chunk for themselves, too,” the supervisor grumbled.

  “Yes, and the next mindshare rebalancing is only a few days away,” Alia said. A few days before power was redistributed and each faction gained or lost control based on its share of the public consciousness. If nothing changed, Prosperity would lose ground badly. “That’s why Prosperity is counting on you. The leadership wants to win back what we’ve lost by any means possible. Any idea will be considered, so long as it aligns with our central narratives. We need to show consumers that Prosperity is the right faction for them.” She ran through a list of the narratives that Analysis considered best for the task.