Pennsylvania Omnibus (20 page)

“…Medical for a release before
entering the station. Do not be alarmed. The process of reanimation is
proceeding normally. You will feel confused, lightheaded, and weak at first,
but normal function will return quickly. Your muscles have been continuously
stimulated during your voyage, and will function normally after a period of
acclimation. After a short episode of reorientation, you will begin to be able
to feel and move normally. Take your time exiting your pod. When you do exit,
you will find Medical on your left as you disembark the ship. Everyone must
stop at Medical for a release before entering the station. Do not be alarmed.
The process…”

He realized that he was in the
Transport station: he’d arrived in New Pennsylvania. He reached down into the
tight joint between his seat and the frame of the pod. For some reason he
couldn’t grasp, his hand searched there for something. Something that should
have been there. But he found nothing.

What had he been looking
for?

From his desk in his office aboard
the Tulsa, Amos Troyer could glance up and see a dozen paper-thin screens that
fed him information from everywhere that TRACE had a presence. Whether he chose
to receive his intel from the screens, or from the BICE in his head, was a
matter of multitasking and how deeply he needed to examine information.
Sometimes the BICE was too cumbersome and resource-dependent for regular,
everyday jobs. For a cursory idea of what was happening in the war, the wall
screens were sufficient. But if something really needed his complete attention,
then he would use the BICE.

It was interesting to note that the
BICE, designed to be the single most efficient means of gathering and utilizing
information, was often too unwieldy for the job when it came to the millions of
bits of ordinary information humans gather casually every day. The BICE had
become—for many people, including the head of the insurrection—something that
was for entertainment, for escape, for personal or sensitive communications, or
for deeper research. But the system proved to be less than ideal for the
multitudes of daily transactions and computations that didn’t require full
concentration.

The human mind simply couldn’t
function well with ten programs running in the brain at one time. In the
exterior world, men and women could perform quite well working with a wall full
of monitors offering different flows of information. The brain’s
latent
inhibitions
sorted the information and threw most of it out as useless,
focusing attention on what was most likely to be important. But the BICE system
bypassed these latent inhibitions, and force-fed all of the information
directly into the consciousness. Too much of that could cause insanity. The Q
helped, but it couldn’t help everyone.

Amos sighed. Ages ago, humanity
foolishly believed that with the advent of the digital age their lives would
soon be paper-free, but that dream had never been realized. Quite the opposite,
actually. It took more paper than ever to support the paperless society.
Likewise, many people once hoped that integrated computers—brain chips—would
one day replace all stand-alone processing stations and displays.
Nope
,
Amos thought.
We rely on them more now than we ever have
.

On one of the heads-up wall screens,
a remote camera displayed what was happening in a sector a hundred miles south
and west of the City. Amos watched as four TRACE units engaged and destroyed an
armed Transport convoy—most likely transporting goods confiscated from the
small towns and villages of the frontier.

The tide of the battle on every
front had turned. TRACE was no longer just a gadfly and a nuisance. Everywhere,
people were starting to realize that Transport was on the run, and the
resistance was rising.

TRACE was winning the propaganda
war, too. They’d successfully portrayed Transport as heartless and tyrannical,
while showing the rebels as compassionate, measured, and just.

But even success and victory carried
their share of challenges. With their increased capabilities came the necessity
of restraint. Amos knew that he could end Transport’s control of the capital
city with the push of a button. Okcillium gave him that power. But then there
would be no city left to claim. Scorched earth
is
a policy, it’s just
not usually the best one.

The rise of the resistance was
directly attributable to the fact that Amos had increased TRACE’s access to
okcillium, an element that hadn’t yet been found in the new world. Maybe there
wasn’t
any okcillium on New Pennsylvania. The first decade here had seen
an all-out search for the rare element.

And okcillium was thought to have
been so completely depleted in the old world that for all intents and purposes
it was considered an extinct element. However… okcillium did still exist in the
old world; it had just taken the right man to know where to find it, and how to
extract it. In fact, it was quite plentiful in one place on Earth: Oklahoma.
But sometimes the hardest question isn’t
where
; sometimes there are also
questions of
when
.

Having access to okcillium made all
the difference to the resistance. The element was the most valuable and useful
material in the war, and TRACE alone was able to use it for advanced propulsion
applications and for game-changing weapons systems. The enemy did not yet know
where—or when—TRACE was getting its supply. But if ever they figured it out,
there would be a war over Oklahoma like nothing the world had ever
seen.

Amos watched the screens as his
forces mopped up after the attack on Transport. Another victory. Even without
it, his people were calling for decisive action. They were calling for the
Hiroshima Option, something he was unwilling to do. Just having okcillium was
not reason, in his mind, to destroy a city with all of its population still in
it.

The full brunt of TRACE’s newfound
power could be unleashed on Transport’s forces in and near the City at any
time, but still he waited. He knew that Transport was in the process of
abandoning the City and hightailing it out west, beyond the Shelf, where it
would be easier for the government to regroup and rebuild. Getting control of
the City was a chief war aim, but when TRACE
did
finally take control,
Amos wanted there to be a city left. And he didn’t want to kill hundreds of
thousands of civilians in order to occupy a city that, in the long run, he
didn’t even want. So for now, it was a waiting game—and it seemed that Jed
Troyer was the piece that was in play. What happened to him would determine the
future of the City, and therefore the entire population of the east.

Amos knew that to the people, it
might look like he was hesitating
only
because he wanted to spare Jed’s
life. That wasn’t true, but the people didn’t always know his mind. Of course
Jed’s life was critical to Amos as a man and as a brother, but TRACE—and
eventual victory—was even more important. Amos knew that he didn’t have critics
now, but with the tide of war turning… As soon as it looked like his people
might win, he’d have plenty of them. He knew all about Churchill, MacArthur,
Patton, and other war heroes who had been cast to the winds once the threat
they had fought no longer occupied the forefront of the people’s minds, and
ruling became all about the perks, with little risk. It was just the way of
humanity, and he didn’t expect anything to change.

He opened his desk drawer and
grabbed one of the little white pills that lay among the pens, tweezers, and
paperclips. He held the pill up before his face and examined it. Such a tiny
thing. The tool of the devil, no doubt, and the legal drug of choice among the
English. Q was both bane and boon to Amos. He wanted to be free of it in his
old age, but he needed it to help him assimilate and sift through so much
information. He popped the pill in his mouth and chewed it deliberately. It was
bitter: wormwood and gall.
Consuming hell
—he thought—
one little white
pill at a time
.

He closed his eyes, and in a few
moments the familiar feelings of peace and acceptance swept over him. He
thought about home, and Jed, and milking Zoe in the mornings and evenings
without a care in the world. He activated his BICE, and the unit booted up in a
tenth of a second.

Now, in his mind, he stood
confidently. His avatar was him—young, as he’d once been. His powerful muscles
pressed against the uniform that stretched over him like armor. He was a
vibrant youth of thirty, and unquestionably the man for the job at
hand.

He was in a darkened room, and he
saw a cube floating in the center of the space. This was the way he’d
personalized his filing system. There were a million other ways to do it: one
could have a long wall of drawers or lockers, an endless filing cabinet,
buttons that floated, or numbered kittens that mewed as they relaxed on sofas.
But Amos liked the spinning box. Each side of the cube was divided into
different-sized squares—drawers, actually—and the size of each drawer was
correlated with how much information was in it and how often it was accessed.
The entire parent box was a perfect cube, four feet to a side, and it hung in
the room without any visible means of support. No wires were needed, because
Amos was
in
the Internet. This room was his control room. The parent
cube could be rotated, spun, inverted, or reversed, all with the flick of his
wrist. He turned the box slowly with one hand until he saw a drawer marked
DB.

Dawn Beachy
.

He opened the drawer with a flick of
a wrist, and a flat card came out and floated in front of him. The big square
faded until it was just a ghosted image, and the two-dimensional card became
brighter once it was floating in the open. It then expanded into the third
dimension until it became a cube as well, three feet to a side and also covered
on all six faces with different-sized drawers. Amos spun this cube end over end
until what had been the top faced him, and he found a drawer with the letters
DM.

Direct Message
.

He opened the drawer with another
flick, and in a split second, Dawn Beachy appeared before him. She was opaque,
and her eyes were closed.

After a few seconds, her eyes
flittered open and she became solid and real. Recognizing the younger Amos, she
nodded. “Yes, sir. Awaiting your orders, sir.”

Amos waved his hand and the two
boxes faded until they were virtually invisible. “No orders. I just wanted to
talk.”

“Yes, sir,” Dawn said. She cast her
eyes downward, looking uncomfortable.

“Is something the matter?”

“Everything is fine, sir.”

“Speak freely, Dawn. We’re old
friends. Is something wrong?”

“No, sir. It’s just… I find it
distracting to see you like this.”

“Why’s that?” Amos asked.

“Because you look like a slightly
older version of your brother.”

Amos nodded and laughed. He looked
down, and in a blink he was his older self again. Still in uniform, but older
and frailer.

Dawn nodded. “Thank you, sir.
Better.”

“How is everything progressing?”
Amos asked.

Dawn put her arms behind her and
came to an “at ease” position in front of the SOMA. “Things are going well
enough, sir. He’s made it to the AZ and he’s going through their immigrant
orientation. I’m giving him nudges now and then, to make sure his mind doesn’t
become completely submerged, but pretty soon we’ll need to activate
him.”

“Let him go for a while,” Amos said.
“He needs to reconnect with his people, and then we’ll let him see the world
for what it is, and he’ll have the context he needs.”

Dawn nodded. “Yes, sir. But you
should know that Transport is going to be using him to gather information. And
immersion like this can be tricky to undo. Every day that he remains oblivious
to what’s going on inside his head, it will become increasingly difficult to
pull him all the way out.”

Amos waved his hand again and a
white screen appeared. He glanced over at Dawn. “Work with him at night.
Underneath his consciousness. Erase your tracks when you’re done. But not
every
night. Randomly, and never more than a few times a week. Don’t be
predictable.”

On the screen, the recording of Jed
and Dawn talking near the water pump at the old farm appeared. Amos and Dawn
both watched as Dawn almost kissed Jed before he pulled away at the last
moment.

Dawn blushed and then nodded. “Yes,
sir. I’ll work with him as you direct.”

“Have you convinced him you love
him?” Amos said. He flicked his wrist and the screen disappeared.

“I think so, sir.”

“Does he love you?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

“Does he?”

“Maybe.”

Amos raised his hand and began to
turn his wrist very slightly. The image of Dawn began to fade.

“You’re going to break his heart,
Mrs. Beachy. You know that, right?”