27
For the fifth straight day since he had first come to Oz, Billy lay on a bed of hyperreal luxury, amid golden silk sheets, half noticing the tropical occident in the amorous sunset, his boyish limbs wrapped weedily around her flawless body. His smallish hands would grope lovingly, exploring every inch of her and she would smile an unreal smile, making him want her even more. They were both nude, which Billy had only just admitted to himself was the reason he came back morning after morning to see her, to live here.
In five short days he had experienced the impossible so many times. He had never had a real girlfriend, never seen a girl naked in the real world, but Calliope had introduced him to the intoxicating and addictive realm of sex, because she loved him and because she said this was one of the many ways that she could make him happy. Their first experience shocked him on so many levels that anyone could be so lovely, so perfect, that anything could feel so good, that he could have her whenever he wanted, however he pleased, with no effort but a desire and no need to consider her feelings, because all her emotions fed from his, meant to stimulate and satisfy.
Their bed faced the beach, flush with the unchanging tide and was as comfortable as any he'd ever slept on. Calliope was to his right. Today her hair shone a vivid blue and her skin was a pale white. Her body was petite, small feet and delicate hands that made him feel large, masculine, protective of her. She rolled playfully onto her stomach, kicking her legs childishly behind her bottom. Blue eyes matched the hair. They looked at him.
She was smiling, but then she always smiled. Her smile only had its varying degrees from timidly interested, to coy, to mirthful, to seductive. Now, Billy thought her smile was inquiring.
Want to talk to me, Billy?”
Even her voice, he thought.
Not right now. Can we just sit a while?”
Of course, but if something's bothering you. It might help to talk about it."
"I was thinking about how . . . you aren't real. How you're too good to be true."
Calliope shook her blue hair, whipping him lightly in the foot. She laughed at him.
"Of course I'm not real! Not when you leave me at least, but I’m not unreal either." She edged a little closer to him and put her head on his stomach, eyes on him. "But you can touch me, see, hear, smell, taste me when you’re here. I'm almost as real as most things you feel outside. Aren't I? And I'm here just for you. Nobody outside of this bed is there just for you. They all have themselves to think about, don't they? But not me. I'm not real, but I make you happy, I know I do. So what's wrong with not being real?"
"But . . . how can I love you if you don't love me back."
"I do, I do love you."
"You have no emotions."
"But I have actions, and Billy, that's just it. You don't need to love me. You can love the way I make you feel."
She lifted her head slowly off his stomach and touched him reassuringly on the shoulder. Her nails were also blue. Billy was tired of his own guilt and of the feeling of shame and isolation that his relationship brought with it. He knew what Blake and Jay might say, or thought so—that he should stop, that it wasn't healthy, for whatever reasons. He didn't know if he could, but knew he didn't want to. He kissed Calliope and hugged her to him and she returned his passion with a fierce simulacrum of desire.
On the night of the fifth day, Jay waited up for his brother and Faraji. He expected them home as he arrived at half past eleven but had found the apartment empty. After asking the computer to make him a hot chocolate he sat down at the dinning room table, eager to discuss what he had learned during the day, and flicked through the day's headlines: a corporate merger, a massive digital bank robbery—24 million pounds vanished from accounts. A poll of Americans said they were just happy enough with the direction of the country, but hated the government. China's economy was finally showing signs of rebalancing after the housing bubble had burst two years before. Construction of Villa 6 was slightly behind schedule, but prospective residents would still be able to buy and move in as of next week, and the long awaited celebration party was on as scheduled. He found nothing that might pertain to them or help them.
Billy returned around quarter to one, head downcast, looking unsociable but not, Jay saw, unhappy. He waved in greeting to his brother at the table, motioned for him to sit as well, which Billy did only hesitantly. They sat near each other in an uncomfortable silence that Jay found strange. He had always felt very close to his brothers. With their parents absent from their lives most of the time, they had always needed to talk, for companionship, guidance, fun, but now there was something else, something stopping it. He decided to have out with it.
"Billy, what's going on? And don't say nothing, you know what I mean. You can talk to me about it, whatever it is."
The younger's face flashed into an emotion Jay had never seen before on his brother. He was silent a moment.
"I, I met a girl."
Jay was immediately suspicious.
"That's not quite what I expected to hear. Still it doesn't really explain the way you've been acting. What's her name?"
"She makes me happy. She's truly beautiful and she cares about me more than she cares about herself," said Billy with desperation.
Jay pressed: "What's her name?" It seemed almost unfathomable that his fifteen year old brother could have found a soul mate. He almost felt bad seeing his brother's face turn downwards.
"What's her name?"
His little brother shook his head angrily. He looked resigned to something.
"Calliope."
She’s not real, is she?"
"No, she isn't real. She's part of Oz, one of the rooms." Billy stopped himself, half pleading half defiant and looked at Jay pleadingly. He stood up.
"And I love her."
He stood up, and went to bed without another word, leaving Jay without any of his own.
"Sir, it's time to wake up," purred a voice softly.
Jay had set his alarm early this morning, hoping to catch Billy before he left to go to see Calliope. He threw off the covers and grumbled his requests for the computer. A coffee with a touch of milk, and some cereal.
"Of course, sir."
Even a sexy voice is annoying at 6 am. He sat at the table, reading a few headlines, nothing pertaining directly to them or their friends in the news, in fact not much of interest here at a . . . but wait, there was something, more than something, from the Telegraph's newsfeed. Mollec Inc. Requests Gov. Approval for Outskirts Landgrab. Oh, and the sordid details, too. He touched the table, could almost feel the shady lines of power drawing him into the league of conspiracy nuts, reading the white, not the black.
He fought it—the urge to open the article right away, truly a paranoid reaction. Could they sense his interest, smell it, like hounds after a fox? He opened a different article. Throwing them off the scent. Newscasters New Credentials, an op-ed piece about the superficial beauty of newscasters. All just to throw the capital Them off his trail, though he had gotten a kick out of the opening line: "Nuclear fallout has reached the skies over England," reports a woman flaunting exquisite breasts." He took a minute wondering if he should open another, cross another river. But he couldn’t wait.
He clicked, a wall of text slid into place, even wrapping around the bottom of his coffee cup.
He scanned it for crucial information: it looked like Mollec needed the Departments of Communities and Justice to approve all purchases of abandoned property, but not just that. According to the article, Mollec was going after parks, roads, old schools, too. Offering owners of land small sums for their properties and purchasing the rest from the government. Jay unconsciously thumbed at his chin. Ah, there it is. He’d gotten to the point, urban farms, and "future development," all in keeping with the Villa’s original designs, almost completely automated, and efficient enough to provide food for a quarter of the nation, including every individual in the Villas.
Jay thought a while. It doesn’t fit. He couldn’t quite say why. It just didn’t make sense. Why not buy land outside the city, wouldn’t it be cheaper? Cheaper to produce food, more arable, less trouble, less need for development—although he admitted to himself that he could also be wrong about the latter. Or was the Outskirts really so disgraced? Just an ink blot on the map. He couldn’t say just then, still something wasn't sitting right with him, somehow.
Perhaps Infohogs was only place to begin.
He went to Billy's room, intent on waking him and dragging him if need be to the café, but his brother’s room was empty. Billy must have left in the night. Jay stared in stunned silence, angry at something. Billy, the morning, the world, himself, he didn’t know which. He turned around and closed the door. He asked the computer: Billy had left at 4:30.
Jay forgot his breakfast and left out the front door.
His foul mood tracked him doggedly up two hundred or more floors of shining architecture and into the Cyberdistrict. He saw the time looming on a massive digital clock, one that frantically counted the milliseconds. 7:22. He fought to contain his emotions and hoped in earnest that they could get out of the Villas and find some real escape for themselves. To do this they needed to be together, and they were not. They needed information they didn't have. On top of it all, he was supposed to be responsible for them, especially Billy.
He stopped at an early rise café called the Wag, sat outside at a small table, ordered a coffee and brooded over his misfortunes. He would go again to Infohogs soon, as soon as they opened. Rather strange operating hours from 9am to 4am, who knew how they kept it up. Feeding the ever increasing addiction to information. He ordered from a blonde waitress who had waddled sluggishly over to him. She was well-dressed but groggily inattentive as she stood over him, looking in other directions. Before long she had left with his order and he was sipping on a cup of black Yunnan coffee and watching as the street began to fill with the Villa’s strange internal tourism. And a surprising throng of adolescents, about his age, girls and boys alike were out. What day was it? Shouldn’t they all be in the Villa's famous immersion classrooms? Most were smiling gorgeous smiles, with white, straight teeth and colorful, expensive-looking clothes to match, almost certain rich kids, far above even his family’s comfortable double incomes.
He finished his cup and paid with the meager remains of the Old Man's money. He made his way to Infohogs.
Four in the afternoon and the words still fought to escape Jay. Volumes had passed, scrolled by in almost instantaneous flashes. Not without some reward. He was reclined, looking a little like a patient in an asylum and just as medicated. His search for information had started with the day’s headlines and ballooned into a massive area of study, leading him down several lines that frayed into still more strands that seemed on the verge of heading together.
One was Bellick, and Jay's adamant paranoia of anything with his name on it. Besides the man's involvement with Hurn, his ties to Biomerge, Mollec, the Villas, and Seventh Day. Jay was also sure that Bellick had a hand in this new land grab. New, he corrected himself, might not be the right way of thinking about it. Carefully designed, maybe. He found little evidence though, just the suspicion that Bellick was a ring on Mollec's finger, one wedding them to an unsavory undercurrent of dealings. He was just listed as a board member, holding a private share of the company's stock.
Another suspicion came from the story Nkiruka told earlier, of years before and leading to this very moment. The planning of it all struck him. If this news was accurate, then could Mollec possibly buy land at the cheapest rates this century? Was that really possible? That there really was some vague Them, a shrouded cabal of up and ups manipulating these things, wasn’t so amazing. It was that he’d run into Them, that he could—there was that maybe again—know about Them. Had They planned this for such a long time, from the beginning? Would anyone really capitalize on the national desire for grandeur, and security, just to get rich—or was it more of a loyalty to an ideal. The grinding march of progress. Had the WR and PoP acts only been initial steps in a government-corporate collusion?
Jay could only speculate. He leaned back and lifted his hand off the mouse. His mind wasn't tired, but he was starting to worry about his concoction of wild theories.
He thought a moment. But what about Nkiruka? Why so many years later was she still being chased? The last blurred weeks were a result of her, or her and her family's coming to them. Why did Hurn insist on such vengeance? He must surely be working for Bellick or with him. An idea occurred to him with stunning clarity, and he bolted immediately out of his chair.
He found Ms. Omid in the cafe area. It was empty and she was perched on a tall stool behind the counter. She raised an eyebrow at his zealous approach.
"I need . . . need your help," he said still catching his breath.
"Ask away, Rocket Boy.”
"Is it possible to get to someone else’s medical records? From here . . ."
She considered the question a moment. Left eyebrow poised upward, threatening to come down on the idea like a guillotine.
"It is possible, yes. Though I don't believe it's legal, but you are probably aware. You'll need a password generator, which naturally we have. Most probably all med recs were digitized decades ago, which means you'll need the name of the database, and the name of the hospital. I assume you know the person's name. . ."
He nodded.
"What's the hospital name?" she asked, jumping quietly off the stool.
He thought back to the article he’d first read about the murders, Midalin recall, "St. Mary's Hospital. Possibly transferred to another."
Ms. Omid smiled at him, "Show me back to your machine. We'll see if we can't sort this out."
After an hour time and a great deal of Ms. Omid's expertise, Jay was finally looking at what he had hoped so earnestly they would find. The folder was terabytes in size and congested with hundreds of ambiguously named files and subfolders. Documents, scans, as well as many file types he had never heard of before. It was beautiful.
He whooped with joy the moment Ms. Omid opened it. She did it without much difficulty really, only a smug they should really make this more of a sport sort of expression.
"Not bad," he congratulated her. "Thank you."
"Not at all," she was always efficient in her comments. She smiled at him and stood up tentatively. He thought she looked a little like a tigress forced to leave her still-warm kill, and he felt guilty. When it was clear to her that he was not going to invite her to stay to examine the information, she appeared mildly upset for only an unconcealed moment. She hid it quickly under another, smaller smile.
"You will let me know if you find anything special, won't you?"
"I'll tell you what I can," he said. He wasn't sure if he was telling her the truth, but knew with near certainty, that anything he found would be more than special.