Story du Jour
They set out in the Mini the next morning, humid heat already shimmering over the asphalt, to buy a computer with some of Anna’s money. Nadine wore a brilliant purple wig, one of the ones Jake had brought back to the first cheap motel they’d stayed in. She’d changed her face as much as she could, bold makeup in bright primary colors, like she was auditioning for a burlesque show themed around sparkles and Da-Glo. The purple wig hung down over one eye, concealing half her face. Jake shifted around in the front seat, trying to stretch out his leg. He’d refused any painkillers, had nothing for breakfast but a cr2a1 combat ration with coffee substitute, self-heating. He directed her to a small electronics store in an otherwise deserted strip mall forty minutes’ drive from the cheap motel. “Park at the end,” he instructed. “Not in front of the door.”
Nadine stepped from the car directly onto the rock in her shoe and winced. Jake climbed out the other side, a process that took some time. “Aren’t we a pair?” he said.
She looked up at the sign over the shop, computers in blue stick-on letters on a white light box. Laptops and small terminals behind dusty glass, armored with a heavy grate. A hologram flickered and strobed over the display: “Great! Prices! Latest! Models!”
“Doesn’t exactly look top of the line,” she said.
“We don’t need top of the line. And they’ll take cash.”
An electronic chime announced their entrance. Inside, a long glass counter held several more computers resting atop transparent plastic stands beneath fingerprint-smudged glass. “Help you?” said a skinny man with a shock of peroxide hair and a shapeless T-shirt bearing a cartoon character Nadine vaguely recognized as a mascot from a video game. He brightened when he saw her. “Need a computer?”
“Yeah, I think so.” Nadine flung out her most dazzling smile, widened her eyes. “Only I don’t know which one to get. Can you help me?”
He blinked rapidly. “Um, what do you need?”
“Oh, you know, just to get online, post videos and stuff. I’m not good with technical stuff.”
As they talked, Jake quietly faded into the background. The kid in the cartoon T-shirt rattled on about specs and processors and holographic projectors. “They’ll all sync up with your implant,” he said, “let you do things just by thinking about it.”
Nadine smiled and giggled and eventually allowed him to talk her into the computer she’d already chosen. She waved aside his offer of an extended warranty, giggled at his suggestion he could help her pair it with her implant, and slid some of Anna’s cash across the smudged counter. Box in hand, she stepped out into the heat. Jake had already slipped out the door without setting off the “be-doo, be-doo” of the electronic chime, and sat waiting for her in the Mini.
They returned to the motel by a circuitous path Jake programmed into the Mini’s navigation. “Just being paranoid,” he said at Nadine’s look. “You do have people trying to kill you.”
Back at the motel, Nadine balanced the computer on the little stand beside her bed. She skipped over all the setup prompts, clicked past its offer to pair with her implant, and connected to the hotel’s network. Jake sat heavily on the bed and dry-swallowed an antibiotic.
Nadine slipped the card from the recorder into the new computer and started typing. “That story you told me about you and Anna true?” she said as she worked.
A long pause. She felt his eyes boring into her from behind. “Yeah.”
“So if you worked so hard to get clean, why you taking stay-awake pills when we met?”
“Ah,” he said, “see, now that’s different. That’s being practical.”
Nadine’s finger moved over the keyboard. On impulse, she added a sentence to the end of the message, about the raid on Tijuana Town and the shot that downed the platform from outside. “Okay, I’m sending this video to half a dozen news sites, couple of old-school newspapers, and an anonymizing redirector that’ll upload it to a bunch of media sharing sites. Connected to a VPN that’ll make it seem like it’s coming from New York via Volgograd.”
“Clever. Your girlfriend teach you that?”
“Yeah.”
“That should create a headache for Taylor.”
“Can you think of any reason I shouldn’t hit send?”
“You scared of dyin’?”
“Not really.”
“Then no.” The bed creaked as he leaned back.
Nadine’s finger stabbed down. “My turn, motherfuckers.” The computer made a little woosh sound, like a jet airplane taking off, as the video disappeared into the rushing tide of data that flowed through the world. “And that’s that,” she said, but Jake was already asleep.
For three days, she paced the tiny room. Neither of them set foot outside the door, just left the little red “Do Not Disturb” light glowing on the latch. Nadine resisted the urge to take her implant online to set up an agent that would notify her if she turned up in the media. She watched the news on the little laptop, gnawing the tasteless contents of the cr2a1 packets and drinking coffee substitute beverage from tubes that fizzed when she pulled the tab. For three days, nothing happened. A sober-looking news reporter with a bad toupee informed them gravely that the police had lost track of her after the sighting in San Jose. Serious-looking men in dark suits and navy ties talked about widening the search, following up on every lead. Breathless reporters broadcasting from the parking lot of the convenience store she’d supposedly robbed said, “If you saw anything, please call…”
On the fourth day, everything exploded.
The serious news sites, the ones that prided themselves on journalistic integrity, bookmarked the reports with disclaimers of “anonymous source” and “unconfirmed identity.” The more sensationalistic ones ran it beneath clickbait headlines like COPS INVOLVED IN TERRORIST FRAMEUP? One thing they all agreed on, from the most respectable news outlets down to the whackadoodle conspiracy forums in the far corners of digital space: this was everyone’s number-one story. Talking heads argued with other talking heads on streaming video. Anonymous posters screamed in capslock at other anonymous posters on underground forums. Flame wars launched and then burnt themselves out in hours. Media sharing sites ratcheted up views faster than a new video from Lemonayd, the demigirl pop band out of Vietnam.
Jake lay flat on his back on the bed, contacts sparkling as his implant fed him précis of the newsfeeds. “Damn, girl,” he said, “you are officially the hot story du jour.”
Nadine wandered into the room in a baggy T-shirt and jeans, toweling her hair, currently a disconcerting shade of neon green. “Yeah? Creating problems for Taylor?”
“His lawyers are battling a subpoena. They say it’s based on hearsay from, and I quote, ‘a slick disinformation campaign engineered by those sympathetic to a radical group’s cause.’” He swung his feet to the floor. “Gettin’ a little antsy staying here. We should find another place to lay low. Maybe get out of LA. Get out of California altogether. We’ve been here a long time. Dangerous, that.”
“Yeah. Texas.”
“Texas?” Jake looked up at her. The scintillating dance of light in his contact lenses faded. “Why Texas?”
Nadine paced back and forth. “Anna found something, right before she died. I don’t know what it is, but it was enough for him to try to murder everyone there. I mean, just this chemical thing he’s got, this marro—morrow—”
“Moroidin.”
“That. Whatever’s going on, Anna said it was in Texas. That’s where the money’s going. That’s where Mirage is. People need to know. About all of it.”
Jake folded his arms. Servos whirred. “You really want to go into the lion’s den,” he said, voice neutral.
“Think about it! We found something. Something we aren’t supposed to know about. Something Martin Taylor would kill over. Has killed over. That’s gotta be important, right?”
“You sound like you’re trying to sell me something.”
“Are you buying?”
Jake sighed. “We can’t stay in this motel. We’ve already been here too long. Getting out of LA is our best idea, but then, I thought that back when the plan was to get you to Canada.” He shrugged. “Okay, look. Every corporation worth anything has dirty secrets it will kill to hide. Taylor’s not so different from any other asshole in a suit. So let’s say, just for a minute, that he’s the kind of asshole whose secrets really ought to be public knowledge. What then? We go to Texas, then what? What do we do about it?”
“Whatever it was Anna found in their database, he seemed surprised she found it.” Nadine sat heavily on her bed. “Whoever’s in charge of keeping it secret has had plenty of time to bury it deeper. We won’t get at it from the outside. But the thing about secrets is, they’re only useful if the right people have access, right? Does no good to have a secret project that’s so secret nobody can work on it. That means someone knows.”
“Martin Taylor probably knows.”
“Yeah. Sure would like to get his computer. But we won’t get close to him. So, we go to Texas.”
Jake leaned back, studying her through narrowed eyes for a long moment. Finally, he said, “You have a narrow window of opportunity here. That recording you sent, it kinda changes the narrative. Tell me something. For real. You scared of dyin’?”
“You asked me that already.”
“Humor me.”
“No.”
“You see,” Jake said, “that’s the problem. That look in your eyes, I’ve seen it before. It’s the look of someone who doesn’t care if they live or die. You know what happens to people like that? They die. More to the point, they take other people with them. We—”
A knock came at the door. Jake jerked his head towards the flimsy bathroom door. “Go,” he hissed. “Now.”
Nadine darted for the door. Jake whistled and glanced at her bag. She darted back and wrapped her arms around it, hauling it into the bathroom with her.
“Just a minute,” Jake called out in a rough voice, “lemme get decent.” He grabbed his own bag and briskly upended it on Nadine’s bed. A pile of clothes tumbled out.
Nadine closed the bathroom door almost all the way, leaving it cracked just enough to peer out. Jake opened the front door. “Help you?” he said gruffly.
“Um, yes, sorry to disturb you, sir.” A man’s voice, outside the room, out of Nadine’s vision. Young. Nervous. “I’m with the hotel. IT. I just wanted to make sure everything was okay with your stay. We pride ourselves on having the highest standards for all our customers.”
“Can’t complain,” Jake said. “What’s up?”
“Well, sir, we’ve seen unusual patterns of network activity, and we just wanted, that is, I’d like to make sure…is your net access working properly?”
Jake scratched his chin with his mechanical claw. “Well, I think so. Ain’t used it a whole lot.” He casually removed his arm and draped it in the crook of his elbow. “I mean, I can get on the news sites and all.” He scratched absently at his stump, studded with surgically placed contacts. “And shows. I like shows when I’m relaxing. I was just watching On the Beat. You ever watch that show? They take these camera people, see, like producers and stuff, right? Have them ride around with the City’s finest. Sort of give you a feel for what it’s like, bein’ out on the streets keepin’ law and order. Sometimes they show us, like, what those robot dogs do, the ones the cops have. Like you can see straight through the dogs’ eyes. You’d be surprised how many crimes they stop. They can see in the dark and everything. Kind of amazing, isn’t it?” He slipped his arm back on and leaned against the door jamb. “Really makes you wonder how the cops ever did their jobs before.”
“Um, yeah, I guess,” the unseen man mumbled. “Listen, I won’t take up any more of your time. Have a nice day.”
“Yeah, you too,” Jake said. He closed the door. Nadine exhaled, shoulders slumping, and realized she’d been clenching the edge of the door so tightly her fingers hurt.
“Pack up,” Jake said when she came back into the room. “We need to move out. They’ve tracked the upload here.”
“That’s impossible!” Nadine said. “I used a virtual network, redirected it—”
“Well, they did. Maybe they just looked for weird traffic, put two and two together. Deep analytics, data analysis, predictive modeling. Egghead stuff. Side channel. They can’t follow the upload back, but they can figure what kind of place you might go, look at network traffic at those places. Whatever. It’s time to leave.”
“Right now?”
“No. I guarantee they have someone watching. That’s just the sort of thing they’ll be looking for. We go tomorrow, normal checkout time. They know you’re in this motel, or at least they think you might be, but they’re looking for a scared Asian chick, not a wounded vet who watches too much reality TV. Get your shit together. Get some sleep. We move out first thing am. We’ll finish our conversation after we’ve found somewhere new.”
Nadine swept the mound of Jake’s clothes off the bed. She sprawled backward, old springs groaning beneath her. The cheap spray-on texture of the ceiling had little insight to offer. “I’m not sure I can sleep.”
“I can give you something.”
“For a man with a substance abuse problem, you keep a lot of drugs on hand.”
“Call it a moral failing.”
“Think I’ll pass on the sleep aid.”
“Suit yourself.”
Nadune curled on her side and pulled the cover over her head. In the darkness beneath, she called up the image of Anna’s face, her hair caught in its net of tiny LEDs, the light in her eyes when the sun broke through the window, her lips when she convulsed in ecstasy. “Are you there?” she whispered to herself.
No answer. Eventually, sleep came.
She woke confused, tatters of a dream of home—her old home in Montreal, the big rambling house with its fenced-in yard overgrown with trees. A firm hand clutched at her arm, shaking urgently. “Get up! Now! Up!”
“Anna?” she mumbled.
“Get up. Stay low, away from the window. Don’t know if they have infrared or radar. Get your bag.”
Nadine snapped awake, the dream already tumbling away, replaced by the horror of the real world. “What’s up?”
“Trouble,” Jake hissed. He pulled back the edge of the curtain just a little. Strobing blue lights splashed against the walls. Somewhere outside, Nadine heard a shrill, feminine cry, panic beneath the confused anger, gruff voices answering in authoritarian tones.
“What’s going on?”
“I think they think they found you. We have to go, now.”
Nadine pulled on her hoodie, covered with cartoon faces, tongues lolling in a comedic caricatures of sexual bliss. She pulled the violet wig over her head, fluffing out the bangs to hang over her eyes. She blinked, eyelashes catching on the synthetic strands.
Jake opened the door a crack, hand raised. “Not yet. Get ready.” The Mini chirped, doors unlatching with a dull thunk. “Okay, now, move.”
Clutching her bag, heart hammering, Nadine followed him out. Three SUVs with private security markings on the doors waited in the parking lot, blue lights flashing. A tight knot of black-uniformed security guards dragged a shrieking, kicking, biting woman into the parking lot, flimsy shirt hanging open over lacy bra and panties, one heeled slipper falling to the ground as she struggled. Another man in the same uniform stood at a door to one of the rooms, thumbs hooked in his belt. As Nadine watched, one of the men drew a taser from his belt and fired at the struggling woman. She convulsed and fell twitching to the ground.
“Fuck me,” Nadine breathed.
“That’s exactly what’ll happen if we don’t move.” He dove into the front seat. Nadine opened the door, threw her bag in the back, and climbed in beside him. The car was already rolling before she’d slammed the door.
Jake drove slowly past the cluster of security around the convulsing woman. “Glad I’m not her,” he said. “Won’t take long for them to realize they’ve got the wrong person. We need to get some distance between here and there before they do.”
He pulled onto the street, past a long, low, black limousine with tinted windows. A man in a suit stood in front of it, watching the spectacle in the parking lot with a mildly irritated expression. Nadine’s blood froze. She slumped down in the seat as low as she could. “Fuck!” she swore. “Fuck! That’s him! Fuck!”
“What?”
“Martin Taylor! He’s here!”
“Shit. Did he see you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Try again. Did he see you? Yes or no?” Jake pulled out into traffic.
“No. No, he didn’t. He was too busy watching—you know.”
Jake let out a long, low exhale. “We got lucky. Again. Gettin’ awful uncomfortable, how lucky we’ve been.”
“What now?”
“As long as he didn’t see you, we’re okay. Once he realizes they got the wrong person, they’ll start taking a long, hard look at all the comings and goings at that motel. Fact we left right when things went down will ring some bells. They’ve almost certainly grabbed this car’s transponder signal as we rolled out, just routine. Still, that won’t lead them very far. Car’s registered to an LLC that’s owned by another company. Anna set it up. No way to connect it to me. Plus they can’t be 100% sure you were even in that motel. That helps. Still, things’re getting thin.” He glanced at the rearview monitor. “Don’t think anyone’s following us.”
“What now?”
“We find another place to lay low. I try to talk you out of your insanity. You might have a path through this. Your story’s getting traction. You take a run at Texas, you’re throwing that all away.”
“Bullshit. Taylor’s never going to stop coming. You get that? Never. Even if the cops exonerate me, he’s going to keep after me. The moment the news forgets me, I’m done.”
“You can change your identity—”
Nadine folded her arms and stared grimly out the windshield. Palm trees loomed out of the darkness. “You trust any identity to stand up against Martin Taylor’s resources and attention?”
“No, I suppose not.”
“We finish this.”
“You always been this stubborn?”
“No. I had a normal life once. Anna was the stubborn one. Where to now?”
“Little Tokyo. There’s a love hotel there—”
Nadine stared at him. “You’re serious.”
“Don’t get any ideas. You’re not my type. I like people who aren’t being hunted by well-funded corporate sociopaths. It’s cheap and it’s anonymous and there aren’t any cameras.”
“After that?”
“We ditch this car.”
“Thought you said it couldn’t be tracked.”
“It can’t. But if a car that hightailed it out of a no-name motel in LA right under Martin Taylor’s nose turns up in Texas, you’d have to be pretty thick not to connect the dots. I don’t think Taylor’s thick.”
“Okay, so then what?”
“We get another car.” Jake sighed. “Then we go to Texas.”