To be free is not merely to cast off one’s chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others.
—Nelson Mandela, twentieth-century leader
The courage Cadence gives me may not last. If I wait long to see my father, I might change my mind. On the way home, I ask the driver to arrange a meeting with Hanif.
“You already have your security clearance,” Hanif says the next morning. “I should be able to arrange this soon.”
I was afraid it might take weeks. I’m amazed. “But they were so careful about letting the Justice Councillors in.”
“Allowances are made for relatives,” he says, and then he smiles. “Besides, you come highly recommended.”
I’m supposed to spend the morning summarizing the broadcasts of RTLM, but I’m too stressed to concentrate. I keep writing the same sentences over and over. I jump when Hanif appears at my door a few hours later. “We can go now,” he says.
I can’t believe this. “To the prison?”
He nods. “I’ll take you myself.”
Erica is waiting in the outside office. “Do you want me to come?” she asks.
I hug her, then I say, “I have to do this alone.”
Hanif and I travel in silence. I’m too nervous to talk, too nervous to think ahead. I’ve imagined meeting my father so many times, but never like this. Don’t expect anything, I warn myself. I’ll get through this and get on with my life, like Cadence said.
We pass through several security barriers before we even approach the main walls of the prison. It’s a huge, imposing structure. Then we leave the vehicle and go to a small door in the wall. Every door is unlocked to let us pass and locked again behind us. I’m beginning to feel trapped. Finally, Hanif says, “I’ll wait here.” I go through the last doorway alone.
The room is empty except for a table with two chairs, one on either side. There are guards by both doors, but otherwise, I’m alone. “You can sit,” one says. His voice is not unkind. I do sit, but when the other door opens, I stand and lean forward across the table before I can stop myself.
The man who enters with a guard at either elbow is tall and dark, but otherwise unexceptional. No one I’d notice in a crowd. I sit down, propelled by the weight of my disappointment. I feel no spark of recognition.
He keeps his head down until he’s seated. Then he raises his eyes and looks at me, reluctantly. And he pales. “You look . . .” he begins, but his voice falters. He tries again. “You look so much like Emily. Do you remember her?”
I shake my head. “I was too little.”
He agrees. “You were very little.” I hope he’ll say more, but there’s just a long, uncomfortable silence. I consider telling the guards I want to leave, but then he speaks again.
“Do you know what happened to her?”
“I do,” I say, and I tell him everything we learned. He listens without moving, staring down at his hands. When I finish, there’s another long silence.
Finally he says, “Thank you for telling me.” Then he adds, “Suppose you tell me what brought you here.” I can’t read his voice. It could be empty of emotion, or filled with all emotions, in the way the colour white is really composed of all colours.
“I want to know how this happened,” I say. “I want to know what happened to you.”
He looks startled. Then he looks scared. “I guess you have a right to know,” he says finally. “My area is—was—remote sensing. I designed tracking systems. Before all this happened, I was possibly one of the ten best in my field. Not in Toronto. In the world. That must sound arrogant, but it’s true.
“I lived for my work; it was everything to me. I never expected to marry. Then Emily came into my life. Her brother, Tony, worked in my lab. We met at his wedding.” For the first time, a ghost of a smile flits across his face. “I almost didn’t go, but that’s how I met her. Most people, when I mentioned remote sensing, their eyes would glaze over, but Emily was interested. She knew very little about it, but she listened and she asked intelligent questions. She was pretty and funny, but what I really loved about her was her intellectual curiosity. We shared an almost insatiable hunger for knowledge. We were so lucky to find one another. The first years of our marriage, I used to lie awake at night and wonder, ‘Why me? What did I do to deserve this happiness?’”
I wonder the same thing, but I don’t say so. I just wait for him to continue.
“When you were born, I designed the chip for you myself. I thought it would let me find you anywhere.” There’s bitterness in his voice, but I can’t tell if it’s because he lost me, or because his design didn’t do what he expected.
“I didn’t pay attention to politics,” he continues. “People were talking about hostility toward technology, but I thought they must be exaggerating. I expected it to pass. But Emily didn’t. She was the one who made plans. By the fall of 2353, everyone was nervous. We agreed then that she would take you and run if anything happened to me. I was so sure I’d be able to track you.
“And then I was taken. It was a big sweep, lots of people were picked up that week. We were all held in the Hippodrome for questioning. Once they latched on to me, they didn’t let go. Have you ever heard of a man named Falcon Edwards?”
“I have.”
“Edwards wanted me for Internal Security. I was held in his ‘private suites’ he called them, his own personal prison. At first, I refused to cooperate.” He sighs. “He was a clever man. He pretended to be friendly, learned all he could about me. It didn’t take him long to realize that you and Emily were my weak spot. He told me you were gone, then he promised me access to long-range tracking systems if I cooperated. They wanted me to develop a system that could track down people they wanted to find without their knowledge.”
This piques my curiosity. “But how? You’d need to plant some sort of homing device on them to begin with, wouldn’t you?”
For the first time, he looks at me with real interest. “A lot of these people had security clearances. Their retinal scans were already in the database. I was supposed to develop a tracking system for a retinal scanner that could be hidden in public places. In ads on the public transit, for example. The scanner would capture the retinal scans of anyone who looked at these devices long enough to read what was written on them. If we got a match, we’d know where that person was.”
“You’d know where they had been,” I say. “That wouldn’t let you catch them, would it?”
“It would if we found patterns in their movements. A lot of people take the same routes every day, even if they’re in hiding. Edwards expected to pick up enough fugitives to make it useful.”
I’ve been so caught up in the originality of this plan, I let myself forget what it was used for. Now he’s reminded me.
“How could you agree to help?”
“I wanted to find you and Emily more than anything,” he says. “And I was arrogant about my abilities. I thought I could design a system that would look as if it should work, but build in enough bugs so it would never really be functional. I thought, if Internal Security invested enough time trying to find people with a system that wasn’t working, some of them might escape.”
“So you never really cooperated?” I ask. For the first time since I’ve entered this prison, I feel a faint hope.
“Never is a long time. You’d better let me finish.
“I agreed to develop the system. I took as long as I reasonably could to design it, hoping people still on the run would escape in the meantime. It took eighteen months to get everything in place. I had hoped they’d let me access the tracking systems I needed to find my family when that was done, but Edwards said my design had to work before he’d give me the passwords. Alone, I could have hacked into the systems, but my access was always closely monitored. Of course, the scanning system I’d developed didn’t work. After three months without a single match, they figured it out. I tried to pretend the flaws were accidental, but that didn’t help. ‘Fix it,’ Edwards said. I took as long as I could, but you have to understand, I was frantic by then. I had to know where you were.
“I held them off for almost two years, but finally, I gave them a system that did what they wanted. Some key people were captured. People who might have escaped without me.” He pauses again. “When that happened, I was finally given access to the long-range tracking systems. Edwards wasn’t around by then. They told me he was dying. But when I looked, it seemed as if you were dead. And without you, I could never hope to find Emily. After that, I lost interest in everything but my work. I hardly noticed when the technocaust ended. I stayed on at Internal Protection. A real collaborator, because that was the only life left to me.
“I deserve to be here. I don’t expect forgiveness. When I found out you were alive, they told me about the work you’re doing here. You shouldn’t be burdened with a father who’s a criminal. That’s why I didn’t ask to see you. There’s only one thing I wish I knew,” he continues. “How were you declared dead? Did your chip fail?”
“No, it still works perfectly. They’ve been using it to track me here.”
A smile of satisfaction flickers across his face. “I knew it,” he says.
“Security says someone must have removed my code from the system.”
He frowns. “That’s hard to believe. The security around those systems was amazing. The Protectors knew people they were looking for had the ability to break into most systems.”
“I was told it must have been done internally, by someone who had access.”
He looks at me in amazement. “If they let me into the system, I could tell who did it.”
“How?”
“I designed it so no one could make changes without leaving a signature code. If the person who deleted your code had a security clearance, I can tell who it was.” His face lights for a moment, but just as quickly his excitement fades. “I’d never get to talk to anyone who could let me do that,” he says. “The paperwork for an interview alone would take years.”
I stand up and go to the door. “I think the man who can give you permission is right here.”