Goldstein Page 3

  “So you think that because there are no dragonflies or drones or patrols that they don’t care about Goldstein anymore?”

  “Yeah, I do,” answered Devin as he emptied his masonry jar. “They must have more important things to worry about like insurgents or race riots or stuff like that down in the Lower Fifty Three. Where in the hell did you get this disgusting milk?”

  “It’s free and it doesn’t give me a stomach ache. We can’t get bread or razor blades or new shoes but we can sure as hell get dehydrated milk. I get thirty five packets a week from the government store downstream in McGrath. I’ve got some cheddar cheese in the back, too. It comes in twenty kilo blocks. I’ll just go hack a piece off. Sit tight…”

  “Sounds wonderful but I think I’ll pass right now,” Devin responded. “By the looks of that electric heating system you got, you’d be better off asking for free blankets instead of cheese.”

  “No thank you on the blankets,” objected Roth.

  “Why not?”

  “Too much small pox.”

  The two chuckled.

  “So what do you plan to do with me then, Roth?”

  “Well, like I said, if I was a true patriot, I would take you down to the local security post and hand you over.”

  “And how would you do that?”

  “My powers of persuasion.”

  “So you do have a gun?”

  “No, just for hunting. I’d probably wire you up with explosives.”

  “What would I fetch?”

  Roth pondered for a moment. Then he smiled.

  “Probably a hundred packets of dehydrated milk.”

  “And cheese?”

  “That’s right. Cheese too. A ransom of powdered milk and cheese that I get for free anyway. How could I resist that? Now let’s get going right away.”

  “I don’t see you reaching for your bombs. Does that mean that you’re not a patriot?”

  “Turning people over to NaPol doesn’t make one a patriot. It doesn’t pay good enough, anyway.”

  “I thought everything paid well. It’s boom times according to Freemerica.”

  A faint heat finally given off by the ticking register began to fill the room. Devin noticed that his shivering had subsided only to be replaced by hunger pains. The thought of the dry government cheese began to appeal to him.

  “Yeah. I guess everything pays well nowadays,” Roth observed. “But it’s not the making of money that’s hard, it’s the spending it that’s getting’ tough. A few packets of this fine government milk probably cost four hundred dollars in the Lower Fifty Three.”

  Devin laughed.

  Outside, there was chattering and the sound of splintering wood. “Sounds like they found your boat.”

  Devin changed the subject. “Why are you helping me?”

  “It’s a boring day,” Roth continued. “Maybe I’m curious about you? Or maybe I’m lonely?”

  “Maybe I’m not looking for companionship, at least not the chubby old Native kind.”

  “Damn,” exclaimed Roth sarcastically. “I guess I’m just curious, then. I have some questions for you.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Roth,” offered Devin. “If you agree to feed me a decent meal, I’ll answer your questions.”

  “That’s a fair trade,” Roth replied. “Here it goes, then. Are you from Goldstein?”

  “Obviously. But you already know that.”

  “Why did you leave?”

  “They threw me out. I broke the law.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I broke the law.”

  “Where do you plan to go?”

  “Hmmm,” Devin pondered. “I suppose the Lower Fifty-Three. I imagine I can get a job there and start a new life. You know, pursue the American Dream.” The distant and unintelligible chattering coming from the banks of the river grew louder. “Goldstein put me in a boat and sent me downstream to die. But I didn’t die. I ended up here. I wasn’t supposed to make it this far. So maybe I’ll go back there and pay them a surprise visit.”

  “If you weren’t supposed to make it then why did they invest so much in you?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your satchel.”

  “You looked in my bag?”

  “Yes,” Roth confessed looking sheepish. “I looked inside. I don’t think they’d send someone off to die loaded up with all that.”

  “Let’s just say that I had what I thought was a friend on The Council. The old blind bastard set me up with some walking around money just in case I made it out.”

  “He set you up very well, then.”

  There came more shouting down by the river. There was another splintering board.

  “To hell with Goldstein! I’ve been liberated.” Devin boasted. “I can’t wait to conquer Amerika.”

  “Liberated?” asked Roth. “What do you know about Amerika?”

  “I know it’s populated by serfs— mindless, helpless, wards. Everything is free there, too. Free food. Free rent. Free money. It’s all easy meat. So I plan on feasting on some easy meat for a long while.”

  “Funny how you describe joining the ranks of a bunch of serfs as being liberated,” observed Roth.

  “So be honest, Roth, are you shaking me down or what? Don’t think I didn’t notice the dragline you used to snag my boat. It was as if you knew I was coming.”

  “No shakedown,” Roth assured. “I do have a proposition, though.”

  “What is it?”

  “I propose that you pay me a fee from those gold coins you got there in that satchel, and I’ll get you on your way to Amerika.”

  “I don’t need your help.”

  “I think you do. Think about it for a second. How will you get around without a multi?”

  “I’ll figure it out. I’ll steal one.”

  “What good would a stolen multi do you? You can’t get anywhere without one that has a plausible, verifiable identity. You can’t buy food, either. You can’t rent a room. You can’t get a job. You can’t use transportation. A stolen multi will be useless in a few hours. You’ll be arrested for sure.

  But before that even, how are you going to get there? Walk? You gonna hike over the Alaska Range? You gonna climb Denali on the way and check out the view? You can’t go downstream because it sounds like you no longer have no boat and I ain’t going out there to ask those bandits to put it back together. And you’ve got no provisions. You have no weapons. Worst of all, those bandits out there are everywhere.”

  Roth walked over to the thermostat and pushed the up arrow button a few times.

  “Listen to me. I can help you. I don’t really give a damn about you, personally, but I do care about money. I’m a businessman. I like to make deals. I can get you a good multi that generates random aliases. I can get you into Amerika on a container ship. I can get you a rail pass to anywhere. I can help you out if you get in a jam, too. I only ask a fair price.”

  “You’ll rip me off.”

  “I won’t. That’s bad business. I may see you again, someday. Maybe I help you get back to Goldstein when you’re ready to pay them a visit. Who else would you call? If I was to rip you off now you might be paying me a visit. I don’t like looking over my shoulder. I’m not in the bridge-burning business, Cheechako. The bridge burning business is a dead end job.”

  “And if I refuse your help?”

  “Then I’ll have to ask you to leave the safety of my little compound here, after you’ve finished your meal, of course.” Devin gazed down at the leather satchel that was leaning against the table at his feet. His host was opportunistic yet his blunt honesty made him seem trustworthy. Devin felt the heat of the register warming his wet socks. Distant gunshots ripped through silence.

  Chapter Four

  “What the hell is your problem?” Barked a gravelly female voice. Devin looked down to find a bug-eyed, sixtyish woman glaring up at him. “Are you some sort of moron?” She asked. When she spoke, her lip curled up revealing a set of yell
owed dental implants. Her scowl stretched an array of creases across her blotchy face. Her thin, oily hair was brownish gray and flat. Her eyes were like bulging mantis orbs which were not quite in synch with each other. She braced herself with hands gripping a walker. Her fingernails were thick and so long that they curled at the tips. She had an oxygen tank that pumped wisps of air through a long green tube into her flaring, hairy nostrils. “Get out of my way, Sub-Saharan!”

  “Excuse me?” asked Devin, surprised at the troll’s obnoxious bigotry. It took some effort for him to suppress the urge to backhand her.

  “You heard me you moron? Can’t you read? Another god damn Sub-Saharan moron, that’s all we need. Another…”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. I...”

  “Read the sign asshole. See? Over there. Can’t you read?”

  Devin scanned the sign which read “The Underprivileged Shall Be Processed First”. He fought back hard against his combative impulses. He was entering Amerika illegally and did not want to draw any attention to himself.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize,” he continued. “I apologize.”

  The old bigot waddled herself and her oxygen bottle towards Devin, stretched her neck upward in a manner resembling a wrinkly tortoise reaching out for a vegetable, and, while gazing into his eyes with a scornful, blotchy, mustachioed expression on her face, she began to lecture him.

  “What the hell do I look like to you? What is this?” She picked up and slammed her aluminum walker on the floor. “It’s a walker you dipshit! Don’t they teach you Sub-Saharans any respect?”

  “Sub-Saharans?” Devin asked as the urge to backhand her returned.

  “Look at this,” she ordered as she jammed her oxygen tank into his leg. “It’s an oxy-tank. Does it look like I’m privileged to you? Huh? No! I’m under-privileged, goddamn it. Now get the hell out of my way, before I sick the nats on your black ass.”

  She shoved Devin aside with a surprisingly strong forearm shiver. Her loose underarm skin dangled and flopped to and fro as she muscled past to the front of the line.

  In order to distract himself from the violent urges welling up inside, Devin scanned the assembled mass of people in the lines around him. They filed through a series of corrals that zigzagged for what seemed to be a mile, back towards the smudged glass doors that opened from the train platform.

  There was a wide assortment of “serfs” present. There was a woman trying to bargain with a screaming child who spit in her face. She dared not discipline her kid lest the security guards pounce on her and haul her brat off to the Department of Family Reconciliation. She continued her pointless negotiations with the little gremlin. A heavy set, twenty-something man with a mullet hairdo, a mottling of facial piercings, and blackened lips stood nearby. His fat, white gut burst out from under his skin-tight, filthy, Che Guevera tee shirt. There were many more people in wheel chairs than one would envision— as many as one in ten. Almost all of the civilians were overweight, poorly postured, poorly groomed, and proudly advertising their serfly ‘status’. Most wore grim expressions and were afflicted by something. Sullen, zombie-like faces drooped off their skulls. Eyes were sunken into puffy faces and ringed in black shadows. The serfs were in far worse shape than Devin had expected. It had been a long time since he was in Amerika.

  “Multi please!” barked an officer at the front of the line. This transit nat was wearing opaque glasses and silver skull badges on his lapels.

  “One moment,” begged Devin as he fumbled through his pockets.

  “Sign says have your multi in hand,” the agent shouted.

  “Yes, I know. I was afraid I would drop it. Wait here it is...”

  “Too late! You go over there,” the nat barked, directing Devin to a red corral a few feet away.

  “What did I do?”

  “Don’t make any trouble for yourself. Get moving. Over there!”

  “But I...”

  “Get moving,” he shouted as his hand worked its way towards a small device attached to his belt.

  Devin swallowed hard and walked over to the corral. Awaiting him was a masculine woman wearing yet another set of dark glasses and silver skull lapel pins. She unfastened a device from her belt. Devin noticed the old woman with the oxy-tank glaring back at him with her bulging mantis eyes while shaking her head. The officer pressed a button on the device in her hand and it emitted a short hiss. Devin raised his hands.

  “Put your damn hands down,” she commanded. “Are you asking for trouble?”

  “What?” asked Devin incredulously.

  “Put your hands down or I’ll pulse you. Multi, please.” Devin complied. “Here, stand here. Put your feet on the marks, no right here, you moron. I will pulse your ass right now! Right here!”

  In a huff, she squatted down which caused her bulbous breasts, rotund belly and cinched sausage knees to all converge at one geometrical point. It looked as if she were about to explode out of her black polyester uniform. She grabbed his right ankle with her sausage fingers and violently yanked Devin’s foot an entire three centimeters to the left.

  “There! Stand still!” She ordered between pants.

  She laboriously lurched upright and with one hand still clutching her pulse emitter, used her other paw to pull a viewing device attached to a cantilever arm down into his face.

  “Look into the scanner please. Look into the scanner! Right here! You idiot! Look into the scanner!” Devin leaned forward into the device. He could see only featureless blue.

  Roth had forecasted Devin’s experience almost a week before. He warned him about the security attendants. He explained that if he was unlucky he would be moved into a special evaluation corral. It was there that his retinas would be mapped while they checked his multi. Then he would be shoved into an imaging tunnel that could scan through his clothing and even his skin, checking for anti-patriotic devices such as electromagnetic disrupters, vials of poison gas, illegal personal pulse emitters, bundles of cash, etcetera. After being fully and thoroughly probed by a cadre of black shirts, he would be passed through into the Land of the Free.

  Roth explained that there was nothing really to fear so long as Devin didn’t draw to much attention to himself. Station security attendants were low-level National Police. None of them could properly operate the detectors. So many government testers had passed through the nationwide checkpoints carrying explosives, neurotoxins, and contraband that the only reasonable governmental response to the problem was to halt the real testing all together. The true purpose of the security checkpoint was to intimidate, humiliate, and catalog.

  In a millisecond, the retinal scanner created a mathematical equation representing the unique geometry of the vessels within each person’s eye. It would send those images by satellite relay to the Transit Security Database of America which was curiously located in Ensenada, Mexico. Unfortunately, the fourteen billion dollar system, developed by the Numenor cartel, could not communicate with the National Police database which contained the retinal scans of fifteen million international persons of interest.

  The Rosetta stone that would enable this necessary interface was being developed by the Cicero Enterprises cartel. This device was being developed at the bargain basement cost of twelve billion dollars but it was still two years from implementation. It had been two years from implementation for eight years, now.

  In the mean time, the main purpose of the retinal scanner was for maintaining the illusion of security. The virtual strip search revealed nothing that the agents could not pick up with a metal detector, an ion counter or a bomb sniffer. The scanner’s real purpose was to humiliate. And the black uniforms and threatening rudeness of the security nats were for intimidation which rounded out their program. Amerikans accepted the illusion in exchange for their liberty. This was the land of the free and the home of the brave.

  The terrorist’s own methods had advanced far beyond NaPol’s detection efforts. For instance, the technique of suicide bombing was long ago abando
ned by them. Its only practitioners in this day were angry teenagers who strolled into school pep-rallies and pulled their ripcords.

  “He’s clear,” muttered a another mustachioed female officer in black polyester and dark glasses. Inside her lenses flashed ‘Threat Level 1’ in three dimensions.

  After being handed his multi, Devin was shoved through the last gate of the checkpoint. He made his way down an escalator into the baggage claim area. He was anxious about his satchel. Checking it was the only possibility but Roth assured him beforehand that it would be safe.

  There was a mob of some four or five thousand people pushing and clamoring over each other to be the first in line to wait. Devin worked his way into the ocean of sweating, coughing, greasy, bloated humanity.

  On every wall, posted every five or six meters, was a tall red and white sign that proclaimed:

  ‘Danger! Sitting, Standing, or Riding on Conveyor Belt Could Result In Serious Injury or Death As Well as 19 Years in Prison and a $14,000 Fine!’

  Devin wondered if he would really have to serve nineteen years in prison if he had managed to get himself killed on the conveyor. He waited patiently.

  To pass the time, he glanced occasionally at the holovisions hanging from every wall. There were a million inter-networks to pluck from the cybernetic ether but every one of the hundred or so holovisions in the claim area was set to Freemerica.

  On the fields, chirpy, sexed-up, talking heads pitched plastic cars, cosmetic enhancements, and instant credit supplied by Fedbank. “Thrift is Theft!” announced the Fedbank public service announcement. Between infomercials ran the occasional piece telling of the successes of Amerikan troops in one of the four invasions being waged concurrently in the name of freedom and democracy.

  Devin waited for some forty minutes until the piercing red sirens went off and the conveyor belts began to move. He muscled his way into the crowd and snatched his single bag.

  Than another alarm went off. It was a blaring, repeating, chest pounding alarm. Low pitched, grating, distorted and ominous, it was so loud that many people dropped their bags and covered their ears. Children screamed between the bursts.