It sounded almost sinister, when she put it like that, though Sandy saw this as a mark strongly in Perrone’s favor.
Perrone Inc. also owned a start-up called SecondSkins, a microsuit marketed not in bulk to out-of-zone contractors but mostly in direct sales, via the web, to individuals, regular folks—well, rich regular folks. SecondSkins had a few bulk contracts. One was an outer-zone touring company, Outer Limits Excursions; Perrone Inc. was an investor. They also sold to some specialty shops in Gulf Zone, where tick infestations cropped up a few times a year, always causing a big panic and leading to quarantines, refugee relocations, riots. It was a strange product. People who could afford a SecondSkin Elite Microsuit (3,500 credits) were largely not the people who would ever be in a position to need one. But Wes’s antennae tingled as he reviewed the report. OLE was a relatively new operation, and there were others cropping up, here and in other zones. It was natural for a kind of large-scale claustrophobia to set in once the panicked post-eradication years were behind them, mostly. People were going to want to travel. Take calculated risks.
Hell, Wes would buy one. As a sufferer from what his psychiatrist called “health anxiety,” his own personal flavor of OCD, Wes was always on the lookout for ways to shield his sad sack of fallible human flesh from disease and injury.
Talk of the Wall was abstract to him. It had been there for the entirety of his lifetime, would be there, he believed—political debates notwithstanding—long after he was gone. He’d never seen it in person. Never traveled within the span of its perimeter, felt its vibration. It was like God: you took its existence on faith, mostly, and you assumed it meant you well. Or you didn’t. But if the scientists were to conclude tomorrow, for sure, that it was an enormous expenditure of energy with no real environmental impact, outside of an increased rate of earthquakes and (some claimed) brain damage and hearing loss to those living and working long-term in its shadow—say they proved it, and the Greens had their way and razed it—well, these forces were beyond Wes’s power of influence. They were certainly beyond the average Atlantic Zoner’s power of influence.
A suit, though—your own little personal Wall within the Wall, another barrier between your body and global disaster? Well, Wes knew there would always be a market for that. Especially if it came (as SecondSkins really should, he thought) in a fashionable, figure-flattering cut, with customizable colors and patterns. This was a product Wes himself could stand behind. Could stand in.
And that’s when the last piece of his plan had clicked into place. It was kind of mad, really—and he’d have to do a hard sell to his board and shareholders to convince them the risks were worth the reward. But what better way to make a show of solidarity with SecondSkins (Wes had already assumed his approach of the company would be successful, that they’d feel they’d won the corporate lottery) than for Wes Feingold, Pocketz CEO, to travel out-of-zone wearing one?
Oh, would he have hatched such a scheme if he weren’t still smarting from the breakup with Sonya, if he didn’t want a drastic change of scenery—a drastic change in himself? No. In that way, he’d been honest with Marta. But he couldn’t let slip his other motives, not to Marta and not anyone else on the excursion, either. If he were to be bitten in the next three weeks (Think positive, Wes! he told himself, his personal “Wall” now bunched awkwardly over his bent knees), the SecondSkins partnership was a bust. Pocketz would have to find some other investment opportunity. But OLE was taking every precaution to make sure Wes didn’t get bitten, that the deal would go through as planned and Wes would return from the excursion triumphant, ready to describe his experiences and boldly announce his intentions to invest in SecondSkins Gen2, a comfortable, attractive microsuit available at a price point (1,000 credits) even the middle class could afford.
—
He was almost comfortable now, thinking through the particulars of the launch, when he heard something: voices. Coming not from the camp but from the woods out beyond him.
At first he was just embarrassed, and he pulled up his underwear and zipped back into the microsuit with frantic, haphazard motions, face so hot that it felt like a giveaway, an ember in the dark. Then his instinct was to hold very still, to let the voices pass him back to the camp, so that he wouldn’t risk startling them and having to explain himself.
His flashlight, still on, had dropped into his lap. He switched it off and held his breath.
There was rustling in the leaves, a broad movement of at least two bodies, then a pause. Wes peered into the direction of the noise, but his vision had been seared momentarily by staring at the flashlight beam.
“How do we do this?” Wes didn’t recognize the voice. It was male, raspy.
“Fast,” another voice said, and this one he knew. “I’ll point you to your positions. I’ll point out the tents with the VIPs.” There was more murmuring, this too muffled for Wes to distinguish. “—under no circumstances. Got it?”
A high-pitched voice, maybe female: “Yeah.”
The raspy voice again. “Yeah.”
Maybe there was another. Wes couldn’t be sure.
“Let’s move, then,” Andy said.
Wes could see a bit better now, well enough to distinguish the shapes of four figures. Moonlight glinted off something on one of their shoulders.
It was the barrel of a gun.
He pressed himself against the tree, biting his lips to contain his rapid breath. There had been time in his other life to wonder, with casual curiosity and even a little yearning, what he would do in one of those situations that were always cropping up on the news feeds: convenience store holdups, back-alley attacks, home invasions. There had been incidents in the last couple of years of PickPocketz, thugs with clever technology for getting past the company’s complex security firewalls, even the coercion monitors, and forcing victims to authorize untraceable large-scale credit transfers. What if that were me? Wes had wondered when these stories crossed his desk. Was he a fighter or a fleer? He was the kind of man—diminutive, neurotic, cerebral—that people automatically assumed was the latter.
But it was not as simple as all that. For now, watching those four dark figures stride toward the corona of light at the top of the hillside, he was neither. He was an animal, paralyzed. And yet he was also his fourteen-year-old self, trying to find a logical explanation, an algorithm for creeping, weapon-wielding menaces who belonged out here in the darkness, who didn’t actually mean him and the rest harm. People from the Wall. Government. Something they forgot to tell us, some problem they’re here to notify us about. That’s why Andy’s with them.
He thought about earlier, when Andy’s mask—was it a mask?—of gruff good cheer slipped. What was left when it did: the contempt.