WE ARE NOT THE CONSUMERS
STOP TECHNOLOGY NOW
—Sign from a protest rally, July 2352
I find the other aides in the cafeteria, just finishing lunch. Now that we’re all working together, Kayko seems content to eat here, and I’m happy, because that makes it easier for me to slip out to see Sparrow at lunchtime. The events of the morning have left me unsettled, though, not hungry. I gulp down a bowl of soup and I’m ready to leave with everyone else.
“You could stay and eat a proper lunch,” Griffin says, but I shake my head.
“I don’t want to miss anything,” I tell him.
“We’ll divide into teams of two, excluding Kayko,” Griffin says when we return to the media conference room. “She can join one team when she’s ready.”
“Blake and I can work together.” This is Astral, of all people. Luisa looks startled, probably remembering how he treated me last week. Astral notices. As he passes, he grasps her shoulders from behind and gently shakes her. “Don’t worry, Luisa,” he says, “I’ll be nice to her.” Somehow, he makes this sound like a threat.
“In that case, Luisa and I will work together.” Griffin sounds uncertain, but no one can think of a reason to object to Astral’s arrangement. Even I can’t. “Ready, Kayko?” Griffin adds.
“I’ve got the first two disks,” she says, holding them out on the palm of her hand. She consults the master index. “One’s a protest rally held outside this building in July of 2352, the other’s a public meeting held about a month later. The protest rally will be harder to sort out.”
“Then that’s what we’ll take,” Astral says. He seems determined to make things as difficult as possible. I give him a look of pure annoyance, but he ignores me.
“Off we go, then,” Griffin says. He can hardly wait to get started.
I follow Astral into a projection room. It’s large, so we can run the recording full scale. I pick up a remote, hoping Kayko will load the disk quickly, but nothing happens.
“So what was that appointment about this morning?” Astral asks.
I’d rather not tell him, but I don’t have the energy to make up a story. “I have a micro-dot implanted in my arm,” I tell him. “I went to get it scanned so the ID code can be traced. I’m hoping to find out who my father was.”
“Don’t you have any family at all?” He sounds incredulous, scornful. It’s too much.
“No, I don’t. It’s not my fault, you know.”
“I’m not blaming you. It just makes me so angry.”
“You don’t have to be angry on my behalf. I’m angry enough for myself.” I’ve never actually said that out loud before. It feels good to speak the truth for once. I realize I’ve shouted, but somehow this calms him.
“Good,” he says. “I thought you were all forgiveness.”
“Well, I’m not.”
Suddenly, the room is filled with people. ‘The holo-projection has started. I have a hard time concentrating, though. Two minutes alone with Astral and I’ve somehow managed to spill my deepest secret. How did that happen?
The door opens and Kayko joins us. What we see in the holo-projection helps me begin to put the early years of my life into context. The people at this protest are afraid of technology. They express the same fears, speaker after speaker. “We don’t want another Dark Times,” they say over and over. It’s fascinating, but we don’t identify anyone. After two hours, I feel frustrated and exhausted.
“Let’s look at the last sequence,” Kayko says. “That’s the media report this footage was used to create.” She pages through the menu and brings up the report.
A South African man stands in the foreground of the scene, with the rally behind him. He must have been superimposed, because we’ve seen this part of the scene before, without him. “At a protest rally at Queen’s Park in Toronto Prefecture today, a coalition of environmental groups expressed concern about rapid technological advances . . .”
“Tell us something we don’t know,” Astral says impatiently.
“Noticeable by their absence were leaders of Save Earth Now,” the reporter continues, “which seems to confirm rumours that the group has split from the coalition. Earlier today, I put this question to SEN spokesperson Swan Gil . . .”
The scene changes to an office interior and the projection freezes. At first, I think it must be a glitch, but Kayko says, “I’ve seen that face.” She has paused the disk. She goes to her file and starts leafing through. After a moment, she holds up a sheaf of papers. “See? Swan Gil. Here she is.”
The woman in the picture is identical to the one frozen in the holo-projection before us, a small, delicate-looking woman with masses of curly black hair.
“Good work, Kayko,” I say.
“At least we haven’t wasted the afternoon,” Astral says, but he sounds less than happy. I’m sure he’d rather have been the first to spot a suspect. “Let’s see what she says.”
“Anyone who says Save Earth Now has split with the protest coalition is spreading idle gossip. We weren’t there today because of internal deadlines for annual reports. That’s all.” She finishes the interview without adding anything.
“That’s great,” Kayko says when the recording ends.
“Let’s take a break.”
“You want to stop now?” Astral says.
“I’m exhausted,” Kayko replies. “Just fifteen minutes, then we’ll page back and find the raw footage of the interview.”
I smell coffee as soon as we leave the projection room. We find Griffin and Luisa, talking excitedly over their mugs. “Who did you find?” Griffin asks. He seems to take success for granted.
“Just Swan Gil,” Kayko replies. “Did you find anyone?” “Six so far,” Griffin says.
“Do you know how these protest groups relate to the technocaust?” I ask.
“I have some ideas,” Griffin says, “but I’d rather save them for my briefing tomorrow. I’d hate to make you listen to everything twice.” Griffin’s modesty means I’ll have to live with my curiosity for another day. “We could use some help,” he continues. “Kayko, would you mind working with us for the rest of the day?”
“I’d love to.” Kayko looks delighted to escape the tedium of our protest rally.
So I find myself alone with Astral again at the end of the break. This time, I’m determined not to let him get the better of me. He doesn’t waste any time.
“Why don’t you know your father’s name?” he says as we walk back to the projection room. I’m getting used to his abruptness.
“I was taken from my mother by a homeless child on the street in St. Pearl,” I tell him.
“You mean you were stolen?”
“Yes. I never saw my mother again. She died in a concentration camp. And I was too young to remember anything. We didn’t know any of this until we found the micro-dot in arm.” I’m tired of answering questions. It’s time Astral answered some. “But what about you?” I say. “You have a Truth Seeker name, so why were your parents taken in the technocaust?”
I expect him to be defensive. To my surprise, he’s not. “I don’t know who my father was either. There was always just my mother,” he says. “Not everyone raised in a religion grows up to believe. My mother lost her faith when she was young. She trained as a marine biologist. Instead of talking to the dead, she wanted to talk to whales. It wasn’t that different, she used to say, except that whales exist.” He smiles. “Her idea of a joke. Astral is actually my middle name. She gave it to me to please her parents.”
“What’s your real name?”
“Darwin.”
“Darwin?”
“Don’t laugh.”
“I’m not laughing. I can understand why you didn’t use it during the technocaust. So, do you believe? I mean, are you a Truth Seeker?”
“Yes, I am. My mother sent me to her parents before she disappeared. She knew there was a good chance she might be taken, and her parents lived in the interior, where it was safer. My grandparents are very religious.”
“Yes, but . . .” I hesitate. We should be working now, but I’m too curious to let it go.
“You think the idea of communicating with the dead is wacky,” Astral says.
“Basically, yes.”
“I’ve taken a lot of comfort from the contact I’ve had with my mother over the years.”
It takes me a second to process this. “You mean, you talk to her?”
He sighs. “It’s not like making a voice-call. There are layers and layers of interference between her plane of existence and ours.”
“But you have communicated with her?” I know I’m pushing, but I want to know what he believes. And he’s been pretty hard on me.
“A few times, yes. When my life was in turmoil and I needed comfort, she was there. Now, we’d better get back to work.”
“Wait, just one more question. How old were you when she disappeared?”
“I was ten.”
“You must remember everything about her. You’re so lucky.”
“Am I?” Astral sounds angry. Then he looks at me and softens. “Maybe I am. I never thought of it that way.” He presses the menu button and pages back to the raw footage of the interview with Swan Gil.
And there she is. She’s beautiful, and she seems to know it. “Andrew, darling,” she tells the reporter, “if you think you’re going to get me to admit there’s been some kind of split between SEN and the coalition holo-projection” she begins, but he cuts her off.
“Swan, darling,” he says, “in my experience, people only talk about ‘admitting’ when they’ve got something to hide.”
She looks furious, opens her mouth to speak, closes it again, then finally says, “Do your damned interview and get out of here.” The rest is what we’ve already seen. I wonder how active she was in the technocaust. I hate her already.
At the end of the afternoon, I can hardly wait to tell Erica what we’ve been doing. We can’t talk about our work on the bus home, of course, but over supper, I lay out my files. She frowns when I use the word “suspects.”
“Persons of interest aren’t suspects, Blake,” she says.
I find myself using Astral’s argument. “It’s so awkward to say ‘persons of interest’ over and over.” I pass Swan Gil’s dossier to her. “We found this woman today. Did you meet her in the prison?”
“Swan Gil? No, Blake,” she says after a moment’s hesitation. “She’s dead.” She pages through the dossier. “See? Here’s a summary of the media reports about her arrest. Not long after the technocaust began. I remember when it happened.” The reports are dated 2354, the year my father disappeared. The other aides probably knew that. I didn’t have as much time to read the dossiers.
I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. “Why is she in this file if she’s dead?”
“She’s a person of interest because she died. Quite a few of the people in your files are activists who died in the technocaust. We’d like to know what happened to them. That’s why ‘suspect’ isn’t the best word.”
“But when I saw her on the holo-projection today, she seemed so, well, evil. I was almost looking forward to discovering all the bad things she did.”
Erica sighs. “You’re going to find there aren’t many evil people in this story, Blake, or good ones either, for that matter. We’re mostly looking at a lot of ordinary people who made bad decisions. I met a man today, very important in the technocaust. I’m sure he’s in your dossier: Evan Morrow. When I asked him how he got involved, he said he was only trying to trace his wife and child. He was promised access to the tracking systems that might have let him find them if he cooperated. By the time permission was finally granted, his child was dead. He never found out what happened to his wife.”
Another man who lost his wife and child. Like Prospero. Like my father. There must be hundreds of them.
“Are you all right?” Erica asks.
“Maybe. Erica, why are we doing this? We can’t fix the past.”
Erica thinks for a minute before she replies. “You’re right. We can’t change the past. I used to think everything would be better if we could only defeat the Protectors. Then, amazingly, that happened. The Uprising came, and I expected democracy would be restored, everywhere. Even if it took time, I was sure it would happen.
“But now it’s stalled in so many places, and that seems to be because of the past. So many people are still hurting, the way you hurt, Blake. So many people have unanswered questions about the technocaust. It’s as if the past is choking everything, leaving no room for a future. We have to put the ghosts to rest, to make room. That’s what I came here to do. It’s not about good and evil, it’s about discovering the truth.”
“But can’t we just put everyone on trial?”
“Criminal trials aren’t the best way to get to the truth. One crime is considered, a few at most, and it’s in the best interests of those being tried to hide as much as possible. You learn less, not more. Look at you, Blake,” Erica says. “Or me for that matter. Who’s responsible for what happened to us? Which individuals?”
“I don’t know.”
“Neither do I. With trials, there would be no justice for people like us. No one would hear our stories, because we’d have nowhere to testify. I’m convinced that healing won’t begin until victims can tell their stories. I believe healing is more important than vengeance. And we need all the stories. If we only hear from the victims, we’ll never really understand what happened. We have to find a way to hear from the other side, too. Maybe that means we have to forgive anyone who agrees to participate in the process.”
“That’s what you want? Anyone who tells the truth will go free?” I’m stunned. “But, Erica, that can’t be right.”
“What’s right is whatever brings the victims peace of mind. The truth is the only thing that will do that, and maybe the only way to get the truth is to offer freedom to those who are willing to provide it.”
“I’m not sure I can accept this.” My voice is shaky. I take a breath to calm myself, but it turns into a sob.
Erica looks distressed. “This isn’t a new idea, Blake. It was used in the past, at the end of the Dark Times, for example, when generations of wrongs made it impossible to assign blame. I know it can work.”
I’ve got to stop this conversation before I fall apart completely and tell her how I really feel. “I need time to think about this,” I tell her. “Can we stop now?”
“Of course. Take all the time you need. Ask me anything when you’re ready. I’m here.” Erica looks as upset as I am.
I always knew our ideas were different, but suddenly, I feel as if we are standing on the brink of an abyss, with her on one side and me on the other. And I can’t see any way across.