Chapter Ten

“The government’s after me,” Casper told Cecelia. “Those two were feds.”

The three of them were seated at the counter of a small coffee shop on the north side of Market Street; bright sunlight gleamed from chrome and Formica on all sides, and half a dozen screens were showing various news, weather, and sports reports.

It was hard to imagine that ten minutes earlier they’d been fleeing for their lives; Casper’s words sounded bizarre and paranoid to Cecelia.

She put down her sandwich and stared at him. She hadn’t yet taken the first bite. “Why?” she demanded.

“I’m not sure,” he said. “Something to do with the imprinting I got, I think—someone screwed it up somehow.” He saw her expression, and continued, “I don’t know why, but they’re definitely after me, and they’re trying to kill me, not arrest me.”

“How do you know?”

“Because they shot first, without asking me to surrender or saying who they were.”

Cecelia glanced at Mirim, who nodded confirmation. “They just opened fire, back at his apartment—never said a word.”

“Those same two men?”

“No, of course not,” Mirim said. “Casper killed them.”

“But you were at his apartment before he…what were you doing at Casper’s apartment?” Cecelia eyed her roommate suspiciously.

“We walked off the job together this morning,” Mirim said, a bit nervously.

“But…oh, never mind. So these two men he just shot came to his apartment?”

“No, two others. Casper killed them, too.”

Cecelia blinked. “He’s killed four men?”

Mirim swallowed, and nodded.

Cecelia looked at Casper, who tried very hard to look blank; he didn’t know what else to do.

He supposed it must be a shock for her, to hear that her harmless, timid lover had committed not one, but four murders in a single morning—or four killings, anyway, as they were all self-defense.

It couldn’t be as much of a shock for her to hear that as it was for him to have lived through it, though; she at least had the option of not believing it.

“None of them identified himself?” Cecelia asked, turning back to Casper.

“Nope,” he said. “Shoot first, ask questions later.”

“Then how do you know they’re feds?”

“Who the hell else could it be?” Casper said, suddenly angry. “Those bastards are always trying to run everyone’s lives…” He was almost growling.

“Casper,” Cecelia said, and he stopped. She stared at him and picked up her sandwich again. She took a bite, chewed, then said, “You never seemed to have a problem with the government telling you what to do before.”

Casper blinked at her, and tried to think.

Was that true?

It seemed as if it must be, really—after all, he’d put up with everything all these years, put up with the taxes and orders and rules and security checks, whereas now the mere thought of anyone telling him that he had to do something, or mustn’t do something, was enough to make him tremble with rage.

The imprint again; it had to be.

What the hell had NeuroTalents done to him? And why?

“You don’t know why they’re trying to kill you?” Cecelia asked. “Do you think it’s a case of mistaken identity?”

Casper shook his head. “I don’t think that’s it,” he said. “They know I’m Casper Beech, or they wouldn’t have hit the right apartment or staked out your office. As for why—I don’t know, Celia, but I have a theory.”

“Let’s hear it.”

Casper recognized her tone and grimaced; she’d slipped into lawyer mode. Hardly surprising, under the circumstances.

“I went to NeuroTalents for that imprinting a few days ago, remember?”

Cecelia nodded.

“Well, I got the wrong one. I’ve been programmed with some kind of combat imprint—or maybe it’s meant for spies or assassins, I don’t know, but that’s how I was able to take out four of them.”

“I saw how you…how you killed those two,” Cecelia said. “You caught them by surprise, ambushed them.”

“But how’d I know to do that?”

“People can do amazing things under stress,” Cecelia said. “You see a lot of it in my line of work.”

“And what about the others?” He shook his head. “Besides, I’ve been having all kinds of weird experiences—I chased off a bunch of muggers the other night, and I’m constantly finding myself watching for booby-traps or planning raids. And there was the speech at the office. No, I got the wrong imprint—and the government must have found out, and wanted to cover up.”

“Seems to me they’d be more likely to want to recruit you than to kill you,” Cecelia remarked.

Casper blinked in surprise.

“I hadn’t thought of that,” he said.

“Maybe they didn’t either,” Mirim replied.

“Oh, right,” Cecelia said. “You’ve got someone programmed with some sort of super-soldier neural imprint that you’ve had made up to your own specifications, and it never occurs to you to see if you can use him for whatever you wanted the imprint for in the first place?”

“I hadn’t thought of that,” Casper repeated. “It would be the sensible thing to do, wouldn’t it?”

“Then why haven’t they tried?” Mirim asked.

“Maybe they know it wouldn’t work,” Casper said slowly. “Maybe it’s inherent in the imprint that it wouldn’t work.” He thought about his speech at Data Tracers that morning, about his automatic negative reaction to mention of the government much of the time. He thought about the Party and the Consortium and he realized he hated them both, where before he’d always considered them something of a necessary evil, the unpleasant cure for the terrorist wars and economic crisis of his childhood years.

Now he wanted to destroy them both, whatever the cost.

Maybe, he thought, he’d been programmed to be some sort of saboteur, a dangerous and involuntary rebel. Maybe the imprint had been meant to create moles, people who would attack their own countries from within.

That was just the sort of lousy trick that the government would pull.

Or was the imprint making him think that?

“So what are you going to do?” Cecelia asked, breaking his train of thought. “Could you turn yourself in, tell them you want to be recruited?”

“No,” Casper said immediately. “They must know what’s in my head better than I do—they’d assume it was a trick, that I was going to turn on them.” He smiled wolfishly. “They’d be right, too.”

“Imprints aren’t supposed to control your actions!” Mirim protested.

“This is no ordinary imprint,” Casper said. “I’m sure of that.”

“What the hell is it, then?”

“I wish I knew!”

“Okay,” Cecelia said, “You don’t turn yourself in—though as an officer of the court I am required to advise you to surrender. But speaking hypothetically, let’s say you don’t—what do you do?”

“Well, I can’t just ignore it,” Casper said, “though that’s exactly what half of me would like to do—probably the half that’s not imprint. I can’t ignore it, because they’ll kill me if I do.”

“They haven’t managed it so far,” Cecelia pointed out.

Casper snorted. “If they’re serious about it, they will eventually.” He glanced at the coffee shop windows, suddenly uncomfortably aware that he’d been in this same place rather longer than was entirely wise, and that he was visible from the street.

“So what’s left?” Mirim asked.

“Run,” Cecelia said. “That’s obvious.”

“Run?” Casper said. “Maybe.”

“Well, what else?”

“Fight back,” Casper said, and he felt a warm surge of satisfaction at the idea.

“Fight against the entire United States government?” Mirim asked.

“Why not?” Casper asked. “They’re just people.”

“They’re thousands of people, with guns and tanks and bombs and organization, Casper,” Cecelia pointed out. “Effectively, you’d be up against the whole damn country.”

“So I’d recruit my own people, get my own guns.”

“How?”

Casper shrugged.

A second before it had seemed natural and obvious, and he still thought it could be done, but right now he didn’t know how. The imprint was playing its tricks again.

“That might be fine in the long term,” Mirim said, “but for right now, the idea is just to stay alive—how do you plan to do that?”

“You’ll need to run,” Cecelia said. “I can try for a court order to stop the attacks—even with the emergency decrees in effect, I think I can plead that you’re entitled to due process as long as you aren’t actually taking part in subversive or terrorist activities.”

Casper shook his head. “No, Celia,” he said, “you’re missing something here.”

“What?”

“You’re coming with me.”

Cecelia blinked at him.

“Don’t you see?” he said, the words coming in a rush. “If you go home they’ll know you were with me, they’ll take you in for questioning, they’ll keep you locked up while they pry out every word I’ve said to you, they might just decide to lose you completely. If they do let you out, it’ll just be as bait for me—you’ll never have another moment’s privacy, they’ll be spying on you every second of the day. And you, Mirim, they’ll do the same to you—you know they will, when you think about it you’ll know it’s true! Listen to me, think about it—even if you could go back, become good little drones again, do you want to? Is that any life to live? Is that a government that deserves your allegiance? What right does the government have to kill anyone who causes trouble? What right do they have to order everyone around? Who gave the Party and the Consortium and the whole stinking power structure the right to run our lives this way, to grind us down? Who said they could suspend someone’s civil rights indefinitely just by labeling him a security risk? Who said they could exempt the Consortium from anti-trust and environmental laws and all the rest, and leave them in place for everyone else? Think about it—they sent me to have my brain, my very identity, tampered with, so that I could serve the Consortium better, so it could keep the Party strong. They screwed up and put in the wrong instructions, so now they’re going to kill me for it. No apologies, not even an offer of a quick, painless injection—they do that much for serial killers, for God’s sake, but for me, it’s a spray of bullets through my apartment door, it’s hunting me down on the city streets…”

He had risen to his feet while speaking; now he threw his arms out theatrically.

“How can you continue to serve them?” he shouted.

For a moment the two women stared up at him, and Casper stared back, meeting Cecelia’s gaze. From the corner of his eye he saw the counterman watching him suspiciously, but the man wasn’t taking action to quell the disturbance.

Not yet, anyway.

“He’s right,” Mirim said.

“He’s right about them locking us up, anyway,” Cecelia agreed. She looked up at Casper.

“All right,” she said, “so all three of us run, and we might as well do it together. Where do we run to?”

Casper looked at both women. He dropped his arms to his sides and seemed to shrink.

“I wish I knew,” he said.