gaping when thunder resounded outside the loft, only it wasn't thunder but steel-toed combat boots echoing on the wooden floors. The door burst in and men with big hands dragged him out like dogs pulling a badger from its hole.
Andy's interrogation took place in the old prison on Hoover Square, in a fetid vault of stained concrete. The big guys stripped him and took him on in relays, like tag teams at a wrestling match. When beating and kicking failed to make him name names, they shoved a cold metal electrode into his anus and hit him with jolt after jolt. Every time they did he passed out, and the EMT required by regulations to be present at such sessions revived him to be jolted again. In time he broke, confessed everything, betrayed everybody—gave real names, Friedberger, Villeneuve, Swanson, Mbeki, and Nguyen—all except Faith, whose real name he also knew, yet managed to sew up in a place his tormentors couldn't reach, perhaps in a chamber of his heart.
For weeks afterward he lay in a crowded ward in the prison dispensary, shackled by one ankle to the frame of a steel cot. The nights were the worst, for then every man lay alone amid the wreckage of his life. During the day the chatter of the others and the restless jingling of their chains distracted him, while a wall monitor brayed continuous propaganda interspersed with martial music and weather reports.
One day a talking head announced a rare piece of reality TV—the confession of the would-be presidential assassin, Andrew Walden Emerson III. His black eyes had pretty well gone down by then, so he was able to watch as well as listen when Virtual Andy appeared in three glorious dimensions—four, if you counted time. The simulacrum looked pale but in good health, its boyish face perfect in every detail, right down to an enlarged pore in its nasal cartilage left by a zit Andy had popped at the age of fourteen. Speaking in tones that any voice-analysis software would have recognized as his, the image told its story and begged for death as the only proper punishment for its crime.
Meanwhile, Real Andy—the one with the sore bones, the scarred rectum, the broken nose, two missing molars, and skin a Jackson Pollock of varicolored bruises— that Andy started cursing as loud as he could with his lower jaw held together by screws and wires. A memory from his days at New Yale had come back to him, an after-midnight bull session with other science students, their tongues liberated by cheap wine and the fumes of Cannabis sativa . Some physics wannabe was boring him with news of a new system for projecting 3-D images in real space, and complaining bitterly because the technique (" really interesting, you know, Emerson") hadn't been licensed for production. Instead, Security had hauled the inventor off to a Preventive Detention Center to continue work under official supervision.
Andy knew then that he'd sacrificed his friends, his freedom, his youth, and his future to shoot a conglomeration of pixels. And now, standing beside Gomez in the Pentagon hallway, he felt the old humiliation and despair return, because that brief chromatic shimmer in the tall man's uniform had told him that his target wasn't real this time, either.
HE WHISPERED THE NEWS to Gomez. But that dark scarred man—older than Andy by ten years and even more experienced in disaster—only shrugged.
Something would turn up. Gomez had learned that long ago, growing up in the dusty streets of Laredo where he studied the secrets of crime and survival. He remembered a thousand fights, a hundred burglaries, and a dozen stays in jail. He'd lived like a stray dog, every man's hand against him, yet something had always saved him from death. Even when a weary judiciary sentenced him to Tuamotu Penal Colony for life as a habitual criminal, Destiny had given him the means to survive. Even to triumph.
By then he was a professional prisoner, what one of his judges had called "a perfectly institutionalized man."
Andy's interrogation took place in the old prison on Hoover Square, in a fetid vault of stained concrete. The big guys stripped him and took him on in relays, like tag teams at a wrestling match. When beating and kicking failed to make him name names, they shoved a cold metal electrode into his anus and hit him with jolt after jolt. Every time they did he passed out, and the EMT required by regulations to be present at such sessions revived him to be jolted again. In time he broke, confessed everything, betrayed everybody—gave real names, Friedberger, Villeneuve, Swanson, Mbeki, and Nguyen—all except Faith, whose real name he also knew, yet managed to sew up in a place his tormentors couldn't reach, perhaps in a chamber of his heart.
For weeks afterward he lay in a crowded ward in the prison dispensary, shackled by one ankle to the frame of a steel cot. The nights were the worst, for then every man lay alone amid the wreckage of his life. During the day the chatter of the others and the restless jingling of their chains distracted him, while a wall monitor brayed continuous propaganda interspersed with martial music and weather reports.
One day a talking head announced a rare piece of reality TV—the confession of the would-be presidential assassin, Andrew Walden Emerson III. His black eyes had pretty well gone down by then, so he was able to watch as well as listen when Virtual Andy appeared in three glorious dimensions—four, if you counted time. The simulacrum looked pale but in good health, its boyish face perfect in every detail, right down to an enlarged pore in its nasal cartilage left by a zit Andy had popped at the age of fourteen. Speaking in tones that any voice-analysis software would have recognized as his, the image told its story and begged for death as the only proper punishment for its crime.
Meanwhile, Real Andy—the one with the sore bones, the scarred rectum, the broken nose, two missing molars, and skin a Jackson Pollock of varicolored bruises— that Andy started cursing as loud as he could with his lower jaw held together by screws and wires. A memory from his days at New Yale had come back to him, an after-midnight bull session with other science students, their tongues liberated by cheap wine and the fumes of Cannabis sativa . Some physics wannabe was boring him with news of a new system for projecting 3-D images in real space, and complaining bitterly because the technique (" really interesting, you know, Emerson") hadn't been licensed for production. Instead, Security had hauled the inventor off to a Preventive Detention Center to continue work under official supervision.
Andy knew then that he'd sacrificed his friends, his freedom, his youth, and his future to shoot a conglomeration of pixels. And now, standing beside Gomez in the Pentagon hallway, he felt the old humiliation and despair return, because that brief chromatic shimmer in the tall man's uniform had told him that his target wasn't real this time, either.
HE WHISPERED THE NEWS to Gomez. But that dark scarred man—older than Andy by ten years and even more experienced in disaster—only shrugged.
Something would turn up. Gomez had learned that long ago, growing up in the dusty streets of Laredo where he studied the secrets of crime and survival. He remembered a thousand fights, a hundred burglaries, and a dozen stays in jail. He'd lived like a stray dog, every man's hand against him, yet something had always saved him from death. Even when a weary judiciary sentenced him to Tuamotu Penal Colony for life as a habitual criminal, Destiny had given him the means to survive. Even to triumph.
By then he was a professional prisoner, what one of his judges had called "a perfectly institutionalized man."
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