A ONE-LEGGED

TAP DANCER

May 2058

“Bertrand Russell!” Alexa shouted triumphantly in Jordan’s ear. “The restoration of mathematics in the curriculum! It had to be you; I knew it as soon as I heard it. Admit it, Jordan: you are Artie Sharp!”

Of course, for her in particular, it was such an obvious giveaway, coming so soon on the heels of him referring her to Bertrand Russell when she was looking for a simple key to unlocking the complexities of intersectionalism. When that segment had recently gone out on the ArteFact Channel, he’d completely forgotten that she’d be watching.

So, what could he do about it now—lie?

His arms were still pinned by her knees. Her hair in his face smelled of rosemary and limes, and her breath against his cheek held the warmth of a sunny breeze. Surely the rapid escalation of his heartbeat was being transmitted by the sensors in his shirt back to the atrial fibrillation monitoring machine at the salutogenesis clinic of Dr. John Erasmus.

And what of her?  Her sudden outburst in throwing herself onto Jordan and shouting excitedly in his ear, her rapid breathing and elevated adrenal system—all symptoms that would surely be captured by her subdermal Vitec chip—risked revealing (should she be monitored) that she had become convinced of Jordan’s secret identity as Artie Sharp, to the point where she felt overwhelmed by the need to reveal it, consequences be damned.

When she rolled off of him and laid her head back on the freshly mown grass, closing her eyes in shame, she heard the strangest sound: Jordan softly chuckling.

She sat up. “I’m right, aren’t I?” She poked him in the ribs.

“You’re partly right.”

“What does that mean?”

“I have some influence in that area.”

He climbed to his feet and brushed off the grass cuttings. She got up, too. A sudden shyness fell between them, and they avoided each other’s eyes.

“The … the Russell thing,” she stammered. “It just seemed like too much of a coincidence. I had to know.”

“Yes, I can see that. But, now that you know … I’ll have to kill you.”

She stepped back in alarm, almost tripping into a tumble down the hill. “Jordan!”

He quickly grabbed her by the arm. “It’s okay, I’m joking.”

He took her other arm. It turned into a hug—a fraternal hug, brief but comforting.

“So, now that you know, I guess this is something we’d better talk about,” he said. “And maybe you can also tell me what you discovered at the Social Equity Ministry that convinced you that a policy was deliberately put in place to divide people into competing minority groups.”

They packed up their picnic and returned to the car. After her impetuous actions on the hilltop, Alexa seemed anxious to restore her dignity in his eyes. And it turned out that the security status she’d been granted after Shane Whitman’s visit gave her access to all the ministry’s archives—including one, most remarkably, that she was sure was unintentional.

“They’re handwritten minutes of the meetings held by some of the Action Committee at the time of the Overthrow. I’m sure I wasn’t meant to see them, and I’m pretty sure they’ve never been transcribed; I went looking for digital records of them, but there was nothing to be found.”

“Who were these members?”

“Just initials, acronyms. I didn’t have time to work them out, but it was in 2039, and I was just concentrating on what was being said. There’s no doubt that they had a deliberate strategy for dismantling bipartisan politics in favor of competing multi-partisan groups. To me, it read like a naked divide-and-conquer tactic. Perhaps I’m overreacting, and it was just the sort of hyperbole that any deconstructionists would spout when society is in a state of upheaval. But it was so at odds with what the Agenda Implementation Tribunal is contemplating now that I’m not sure what I’m meant to be doing… And from what my father wrote in that last financial column before he disappeared, he seemed to know exactly what was going on.”

When they reached the site of the former roadblock at the wind farm, the protesters were packing up, and they weren’t stopped again.

“Nuclear fusion has already won the day,” Jordan observed. “These protests are just dying arguments over who should continue to get government subsidies for inefficient renewable resources, and whether the virtue signals of wind and solar power are relevant anymore.”

Would he have spoken so frankly to her about things like this before the revelation on the hill? Probably not—Jordan had come down off that hillside a changed man. Being outed by Alexa was almost a relief. He didn’t want there to be a lie between them any longer, and if he was wrong to trust her, then he couldn’t trust his instincts either. Where would that leave him?

They drove back to the city with a renewed energy between them, as if they had faced a major fear together—and found it to be a mirage. He agreed that he would do what he could to discover what had happened to her father, confessing how much pain his separation from Lexie had caused him. He explained how the dissolution of parental bonds—patriarchal ones in particular—was a deliberate objective of the state, for the obvious reason that exclusive control by and dependency on the state were essential to maintaining its power. Touching briefly on his own experience at the hands of the FIB, he urged her not to be angry about her father’s absence, but to let Jordan use his resources at the DDC to try and trace him. Meanwhile, he wondered if she could get access to those handwritten records again; if so, it might be possible to copy them without anyone knowing.

“Do you wear reading glasses when you’re working?” he asked.

“Sometimes. Why?”

“Bring them with you next time we meet. I’ll explain then.”

As to her discovery of his alter ego, little more was said. She now knew his secret, and he knew hers. They didn’t know at this stage where they were headed, but they sensed they could safely travel there together.

When the autonomous car announced that they had arrived at Jordan’s apartment, he took Alexa’s arm and steered her to a corner of the building that was a blind spot for surveillance.

“Artie Sharp is a one-legged tap dancer,” he cautioned. “He dances on the leg of truth. But truth alone provides no rhythm or ability to syncopate. If you think he can be an answer for you, you must find him another leg to dance on. You’re an insider now; that’s where you’ll find it.”

As enigmatic as this may have sounded, she understood fully that he was referring to the door that Shane Whitman had opened for her, and he was encouraging her to step inside.

The following day, true to his word, Jordan set in motion a search for Donald Melville Smythe in the encrypted files of the Total Information Agency archives. If the FIB had buried her father, that’s where he would be interred, and the quantum computers of the Derangers’ network would eventually track him down.

Meanwhile, perhaps triggered by Alexa’s concern for her father, Jordan’s thoughts returned to Lexie and how easily she had been turned against him—first by her mother, then by the feminist hive.