The Revisionists (23 page)

Then she asks, “What happened to your brother?”

“IED, under his Humvee. A supply run on a very bad road.”

“Did you… investigate at all, ask around?”

“No.”

She looks like she doesn’t believe me. Maybe I’ve made a crucial mistake. I’m too good at concealing pain.

But her face changes, slowly, as if she’s beginning to understand how two people can respond to the same tragedy in different ways.

“Maybe I’m too skeptical for my own good,” she says. “I just have a hard time trusting that the government is telling the truth when it’s already told so many lies. I mean, some PR guy in the U.S. Army press office told me how Marshall died, but I can’t just believe him. I have to find the real story.”

“War is awful.”

She has nothing to add to that.

“And I believe we’ll come to a point where we won’t have it anymore.”

She looks at me as if I’ve said something outlandish. “You do? I
tell
myself I do, but—”

“I do believe it. We’ll figure it out eventually. A time will come when no one will have to tell the kind of stories we just did.”

“You sound so sure of yourself.” Being in the presence of such unfettered optimism is disorienting to her.

“It’s not myself I’m sure of,” I say. I wish there were a way to explain this to her, but there isn’t.

“But… I mean, the political activism and this book I’m trying to write about Marshall—I’m doing all of this for the
future,
you know? Because I want a better future, I want my kids and grandkids to grow up in a world where they don’t even have to
think
of enlisting. A world where we don’t have all these wars popping up. But, honestly, when I sit down and try to imagine a future like that… A world where people aren’t as petty as we are? A world where human nature is somehow different? I mean, that’s science fiction. That’s crazy. I’m working and working for a better future, but
I can’t even imagine it
.”

Her eyes are tearing up. She has tried for so long to let her lawyerly combativeness beat down her emotions, but her emotions are waging a sneak attack. Their victory rolls down her cheeks.

I reach out to take her hand.

“But some of us can,” I say. “And maybe that’s enough.”

My wife complimented me on being an excellent liar. It was one of the last things she ever said to me.

Lying for a good cause, committing indiscretions in the name of a greater good—these are equations I have plenty of experience balancing. I enforce rules I don’t always understand. I deceive my targets, my friends, my wife. I need to lie, tell different stories, make things up. Provide excuses, justifications. Sometimes I think them up in advance, so they’re ready to be deployed at various opportunities; sometimes I ad-lib, writing them as I speak. My voice becomes just a tool, inanimate. Not really a part of myself.

Cemby understood there were things I couldn’t tell her. What must it have been like to live with someone she could never fully know? Someone who always had to hide things from her? Even if she knew I was lying because I had to, nothing personal, could she forgive me? Did it drive her a little crazy? Or did it seem to her that
I
was the crazy one, that she was the only sane person in an insane world?

Of course, I know so much about everyone else: their secrets, their goals, their hopes. And their pasts—the Government keeps track of citizens’ pasts even after the people themselves delete their old records. Once I became a level-5 intelligence officer, I had top clearance, could find information on a mark that the mark himself had likely forgotten.
We know them better than they know themselves,
we always said. Whole parts of their lives had vanished in a tangible sense: no images, no relics, no receipts, no mementos. All they had were their memories, fragile, fading, altering in their minds with the passage of time. Polluted by wistfulness, by fantasies, by the ways they wished things had been. We intelligence officers had access to the real past, the real them. Or did we? What
was
the real them, the data and irrefutable evidence I could look up, or the constantly half-forgotten and revised fictions they carried in their own minds?

I was cleared for level 5 just after I married Cemby. Instead of investigating routine crimes—yes, we do have the occasional crime, albeit nothing like this anarchic 21st century—I was intercepting the few remaining rebel groups, clamping down on agitators. Society continued to function as intended, and most people had no idea of the threats that popped up now and again.

Most of my cases were standard detect-and-deletes on citizens who were illegally harboring historical information. I did it for years. I think I liked it. I’m not sure anymore. New events have a way of skewing everything behind them. I revise my own past as I go, have revised it so many times I can’t help but doubt my own memories, or whatever these scenes in my head are.

It was a few days before my wife and daughter’s accident that I discovered the existence of the hags.

We’d been running traces on a scientific researcher named Dalton. He was young, working for a bionetics firm. Something related to reversing dead seas, if such a thing is possible. It probably isn’t, but that won’t stop them from trying. Scientists of various stripes are given degrees of clearance regarding historical information—they need access to some of it to make progress and build on past discoveries. But they’re closely watched.

Dalton wasn’t deleting his files as quickly as he should have been. It’s a common error, and one usually committed by a standard, patriotic, overworked citizen who lets things slide. It’s a tier-2 misdemeanor and it lands you on the Lists for a few years.

These sorts of visits were once the bulk of my job—visits as minor and annoying as those of the taxation officers who noticed incorrect computations and hit people with audits—but I was doing fewer of them, usually just to train a rookie. I never expected trouble. A true criminal would cover his tracks better. He would never do something as stupid as allowing old files to accumulate, the way this Dalton had.

Still, there I was, knocking on the door to his eighth-floor apartment at 10:00 p.m. I always visited late, when people’s defenses were down.

I was holding my ID up to his screen before his voice even came over the comm to ask who I was. He sounded nervous, but everyone did around us. Beside me was a rookie named Hyer, a big kid, too intimidated by the job to reveal any personality yet. I’d told him to speak as little as possible.

The door slid open. Dalton was paler in person than he’d looked in his files, which was never a good sign. The descendants of lines that hadn’t sufficiently mixed tended to be the ones who harbored ill will toward society. I knew his height and weight, but he seemed shorter than the numbers, stooping from fatigue or fear. His eyes were red. It was obvious he had been staring at a screen for too long. Marks sometimes became suspicious, or were tipped off somehow, and deleted their files at the last minute. We’d recently developed ways to surreptitiously place holds on their accounts. I wondered if he’d been frantically trying to tap in while we were waiting at his door.

I told him we were coming in and we did. He stuttered, asking what he’d done wrong.

“You have several files that exceed the expiration limit. Several thousand such files.”

He swallowed. Hyer took a few steps and stood at Dalton’s side. The target had to keep turning his head to see both of us, adding to his disorientation.

We entered the standard lair of a well-educated scientific brat. Bright images of beaches and sunsets shone forth from monitors on the walls; the furniture was sleek and male. His vidder was in the back corner, near a window that offered a narrow view of the space between this building and the next. At that hour, the view was of nothing but darkness, reflections of ourselves, and the knowledge of a steep drop.

“I, um, I must have let it slip. I’m sorry. I’m at this new job and the stress is insane—I’ve just been bad about cleaning old files, that’s all.”

“We know about your new job. We know it’s very important, and you’ve been working hard. You’re a tribute to our society, Mr. Dalton. The Phoenix Generation would be proud.”

He looked both flattered and scared. “Um, thank you.”

“In my experience, though, people in such jobs tend to think they can get away with things.”

“No, no!” I’d been speaking in even tones yet still I was terrifying him. It was so easy. “I’m not like that. Really, it was an honest mistake. I mean, a stupid mistake.”

“An honest mistake, or a stupid one? Are you an honest man, Mr. Dalton, or a stupid man?”

He didn’t know how to respond.

“Are you saying you’re both, or that they’re the same thing?” I looked at Hyer, then back at the target. “I’m an honest man—does that mean I’m also stupid?”

Dalton was falling to pieces; I didn’t have to speak another word. But his manner was alarming. People were scared of us, yes, but he seemed more scared than usual.

“No, no, sir, absolutely not. I was calling
myself
stupid.”

“Good, because I’m really not stupid at all. I’m quite bright. But I do feel a little dumb, just a tad slow, when I read your communications about the Revisions project. Could you help me understand that project better?”

Analysts had been watching his correspondence since his files backdated too far. Standard procedure, but usually there weren’t enough analysts to keep up. They would just speed-read a few things, assume all was well, and pass the records on to Security for the standard visit. But the analyst on Dalton’s case had been a voracious and thorough reader. She’d noted that Dalton used strange diction whenever he wrote to a colleague about something called Revisions. It had seemed like he was communicating in code.

I assumed there was a logical explanation. These leads never went anywhere. Which was why I was surprised to see Dalton’s face go even paler. The room was cool, yet his forehead shone.

“Re-revisions?” he stammered.

“I called your boss this morning and asked her about it. She’d never heard of it. So I called her boss. And do you know what he said?”

“No.” His voice was shrinking.

“He’d never heard of it either.”

“Um, I…”

Hyer folded his arms and lowered his head a bit. He had a dumb-sounding voice but a great look for the part. If he kept his mouth shut, he’d go far.

“Is there something you’d like to tell us, Mr. Dalton,” I asked, “to make things a little easier on yourself?”

He shivered as he searched in vain for a helpful word or two. I looked at one of the images on his mantel, a girl about his age. “She’s pretty,” I lied. “I wonder what she knows about it.”

“Nothing!” he shouted. “She doesn’t—she’s not involved. She has nothing to do with it.”

I turned back to him and kept my facial muscles still for a few seconds while his did the opposite. He looked as if he might explode. “Nothing to do with what?” I asked.

He sank onto his sofa. His head fell into his hands. I told Hyer to tap into Dalton’s account through the vidder, pull up the relevant correspondence. I could have just asked Dalton to do it, but at that moment it would have been too much for him to even turn on a light.

“I never wanted to get involved,” Dalton said when he looked up. His eyes were wet. “I’m not that kind of person, understand?”

“Of course you’re not. Your files demonstrate that you’ve been a class-A citizen. Someone forced you.”

“Yes! It’s just, my parents, they’re very sick. They’ve been trying to get access to this new treatment that another firm’s been pioneering. I, I tried to get a job there, you know, and see if I could pull some strings that way, but I… didn’t get hired.”

“So you started working at AdvanceSeaBio instead.”

“And when I was doing my hist-search through Archives to lay the groundwork for my new project, my boss—”

“Ms. Carmichael.”

“Yes, Ms. Carmichael, she told me to pull up some other files. They didn’t seem relevant to what I was doing, but, you know, she’s my boss.”

“You were just doing as you were told.”

“And then, I get these calls, and I meet this guy who tells me he can get my parents that treatment, he can move them to the top of the list, but he needs me to use my account to store some more files. He never even told me his name, only that he could get Mom and Dad into the trials. Honestly, that’s all it was. I know it was stupid of me, and—”

“This started how long ago?”

“Um, about a year, I think?”

I waited. He must have been dizzy from darting his eyes to me, then to the floor, then to Hyer, then back to me again.

“How are your parents now, Mr. Dalton?”

His hands were clasped before him, the fingers interlocked, like images I’d seen of people praying. If history was any indication, it wouldn’t do him any good.

“They’re getting better,” he said, quietly.
The next syllable,
I said to myself.
His voice will break on the next syllable.

“That’s good. Hopefully the treatment they’ve received so far will be enough.”

“Please—”

I waited a moment for him to get control of himself. “I don’t believe your story,” I said. “I don’t believe a reasonably intelligent person like you would put himself at risk that way unless he had something else in mind. I think that what you’ve just told me is a very interesting beginning—the opening sentence—of a much more complicated story that you’re going to explain to us one way or another. But not here.”

I nodded at Hyer. “Let’s take him in.”

Hyer restrained the crying young scientist, which mostly involved preventing him from collapsing. I called the office and told them to reserve a Dark Room for us, on hearing which Dalton gasped. I also told them to get an Intervention team here immediately, sweep the apartment for bugs. Whoever had recruited a fool like Dalton was probably smart enough to keep careful watch over him. For all I knew, everything we’d just said had been recorded by someone else.