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NoLiMa

Dataset card Data Studio Files
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"That is the hidden concept in all the ancient texts, this idea of disturbance. To call the shed, you disturb it from something else that it was doing. You remove it from an environment that is somehow essential to its nature and pleasure, and drag it into corporeal activity. "
"It's still our country," I said. "We still have the right to do this."
Van looked like she was going to cry. She took a couple of deep breaths and stood up. "I can't do it, I'm sorry. I can't watch you do this. It's like watching a car-wreck in slow motion. You're going to destroy yourself, and I love you too much to watch it happen."
She bent down and gave me a fierce hug and a hard kiss on the cheek that caught the edge of my mouth. "Take care of yourself, Marcus," she said. My mouth burned where her lips had pressed it. She gave Jolu the same treatment, but square on the cheek. Then she left.
Jolu and I stared at each other after she'd gone.
I put my face in my hands. "Dammit," I said, finally.
Jolu patted me on the back and ordered me another latte. "It'll be OK," he said.
"You'd think Van, of all people, would understand." Half of Van's family lived in North Korea. Her parents never forgot that they had all those people living under a crazy dictator, not able to escape to America, the way her parents had.
Jolu shook his head. "You can't, you know. You can't fight back against that."
None of us much wanted to talk about revenge then. Instead, we talked about what we would do next. We had to go home. Our phones' batteries were dead and it had been years since this neighborhood had any payphones. We just needed to go home. I even thought about taking a taxi, but there wasn't enough money between us to make that possible.
So we walked. On the corner, we pumped some quarters into a San Francisco Chronicle newspaper box and stopped to read the front section. It had been five days since the bombs went off, but it was still all over the front cover.
Severe haircut woman had talked about "the bridge" blowing up, and I'd just assumed that she was talking about the Golden Gate bridge, but I was wrong. The terrorists had blown up the Bay bridge .
"Why the hell would they blow up the Bay bridge?" I said. "The Golden Gate is the one on all the postcards." Even if you've never been to San Francisco, chances are you know what the Golden Gate looks like: it's that big orange suspension bridge that swoops dramatically from the old military base called the Presidio to Sausalito, where all the cutesy wine-country towns are with their scented candle shops and art galleries. It's picturesque as hell, and it's practically the symbol for the state of California. If you go to the Disneyland California Adventure park, there's a replica of it just past the gates, with a monorail running over it.
They went into the vestibule and then turned left into a flat. Now, until this time, she’d always turned right when visiting the wizard, but now on the right there was nothing but a smooth, unbroken wall. And to the left, there was an entirely different flat, barren of furniture as her own flat, small and dirty and smelling of death.
“Search away,” the wizard said. He tried to put a hand on Valentine’s shoulder and she shied away and dropped her hand to the waistband of the trousers he’d printed for her, where she’d hidden her mother’s tiny sidearm. “You’ll find nothing, I assure you.”
Valentine could see that they’d find nothing. All the furniture in the room couldn’t have concealed a single tin of food. This wasn’t even the right flat. With her amazing ears, she heard the movement of the wizard’s associates, the documentarians, in the next flat over.
“I hear them,” she said. “Next door. This isn’t the right flat.”
“This is the flat you led me to,” the old hero said.
“It’s through there!” she said, pointing at the blank wall. “It’s a false wall!” She thumped it but it was solid and stony. Tears pricked her eyes. “These clothes!” she said, desperately, plucking at her shirt and trousers. “He printed them for me! He has hardened logic printers on the other side of that wall. He could win the war!”
"You tried to be funny about joy and duty," said Miss Dearborn reprovingly; "so of course you didn't succeed."
"I didn't know you were going to make us read the things out loud," said Rebecca with an embarrassed smile of recollection.
"Joy and Duty" had been the inspiring subject given to the older children for a theme to be written in five minutes.
Rebecca had wrestled, struggled, perspired in vain. When her turn came to read she was obliged to confess she had written nothing.
"You have at least two lines, Rebecca," insisted the teacher, "for I see them on your slate."
"I'd rather not read them, please; they are not good," pleaded Rebecca.
"Read what you have, good or bad, little or much; I am excusing nobody."
Dick Carter's head disappeared under the desk, while Living Perkins choked with laughter.
Miss Dearborn laughed too; she was little more than a girl, and the training of the young idea seldom appealed to the sense of humor.
"You must stay after school and try again, Rebecca," she said, but she said it smilingly. "Your poetry hasn't a very nice idea in it for a good little girl who ought to love duty."
Courtney Polk was probably dead. Maybe I should drop the case and disappear into the woodwork—I didn’t precisely live on the grid anyway; I could get a new set of IDs and head off to a new city, and just let Pithica or anybody else try to track me down. I could leave Steve and his people chasing Dawna Polk, and the police chasing their tails, and Arthur and Checker doing whatever the hell they wanted, and Pithica could keep playing its merry game—I didn’t really care. And screw Courtney. Dawna had hired me to rescue her under false pretenses anyway and hadn’t even paid me.
The thought of abandoning Courtney gave me a squirmier feeling than anything else. I’d never broken a contract before. My priorities probably proved Tresting’s point about me being a bad person.
I tried not to think about that either, or what Tresting had said to me. Your first solution is always to pull the trigger... That wasn’t a bad thing, I insisted to myself. It meant I survived, and would keep surviving. I needed to keep reminding myself of that, because Arthur’s words kept echoing in my head, tedious and ugly and irritating. Life is cheap to you...
“You betrayed us!” My M4 swung to point at Arthur. “You—!”
Rio placed a cautious hand on my weapon, shifting it off line. “Cas, it isn’t his fault. Dawna Polk did talk to you, didn’t she?” he said to Arthur.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, wretchedly. “I’m sorry, Russell.”
I had to restrain myself from hitting him.
“Give me the phone,” said Rio. He hit a button and held the phone out in front of us, raising his voice slightly. “Go ahead.”
I recognized Dawna Polk’s mellifluous voice on the speaker immediately. “I must say I’m impressed.”
Rio was silent.
“You evaded extensive security measures. We only knew you were here thanks to our friendship with Mr. Tresting.”
I wanted to scream.
“I hope you know that is a vast compliment, Mr. Sonrio. We were extremely prepared for your visit, and you still slipped in undetected. Mr. Tresting’s involvement was a contingency we never thought we would have to use. May I ask how you infiltrated us so effectively?”
“I’m certain you shall figure it out eventually,” said Rio evenly.
I know just such a clueless person, and his name is Fred Benson, one of three vice-principals at Cesar Chavez. He's a sucking chest wound of a human being. But if you're going to have a jailer, better a clueless one than one who's really on the ball.
"Marcus Yallow," he said over the PA one Friday morning. The PA isn't very good to begin with, and when you combine that with Benson's habitual mumble, you get something that sounds more like someone struggling to digest a bad burrito than a school announcement. But human beings are good at picking their names out of audio confusion -- it's a survival trait.
I grabbed my bag and folded my laptop three-quarters shut -- I didn't want to blow my downloads -- and got ready for the inevitable.
"Report to the administration office immediately."
My social studies teacher, Ms Galvez, rolled her eyes at me and I rolled my eyes back at her. The Man was always coming down on me, just because I go through school firewalls like wet kleenex, spoof the gait-recognition software, and nuke the snitch chips they track us with. Galvez is a good type, anyway, never holds that against me (especially when I'm helping get with her webmail so she can talk to her brother who's... gave me a smack on the ass as I walked past. I've known Darryl since we were still in diapers and escaping from play-school, and I've been getting him into and out of trouble the whole time. I raised my arms over my head like a prizefighter and made my exit from Social Studies and began the perp-walk to the office.
"He died—just before."
"Oh!" And Rebecca's eyes grew misty.
"He was a soldier and he died of a gunshot wound, in a hospital, down South."
"Oh! aunt Jane!" softly. "Away from you?"
"No, I was with him."
"Was he young?"
"Yes; young and brave and handsome, Rebecca; he was Mr. Carter's brother Tom."
"Oh! I'm so glad you were with him! Wasn't he glad, aunt Jane?"
Jane looked back across the half-forgotten years, and the vision of Tom's gladness flashed upon her: his haggard smile, the tears in his tired eyes, his outstretched arms, his weak voice saying, "Oh, Jenny! Dear Jenny! I've wanted you so, Jenny!" It was too much! She had never breathed a word of it before to a human creature, for there was no one who would have understood. Now, in a shamefaced way, to hide her brimming eyes, she put her head down on the young shoulder beside her, saying, "It was hard, Rebecca!"
The Simpson baby had cuddled down sleepily in Rebecca's lap, leaning her head back and sucking her thumb contentedly. Rebecca put her cheek down until it touched her aunt's gray hair and softly patted her, as she said, "I'm sorry, aunt Jane!"
“You don’t take vacations.”
“Work’s been slow,” I admitted. The jobs I got paid me more cash than I knew what to do with, but the dead time in between was becoming a problem. “I think...”
“What’s going on?”
“No proof, but I think the Lorenzo family might be putting in a bad word here and there. Mama Lorenzo can’t break appearances by coming after me aboveboard, and she might’ve said we were square, but I’ve gotten hints she’s held onto a gallon or so of resentment after last year.”
“And she’s good at subtle,” Arthur agreed. “Shit. Well, I’m in luck then, ’cause I might have a job for you, and looks like you’re available.”
“Ha. I don’t need your charity.”
“Ain’t charity. Client knows I need an assist on this. Your rate’ll be met.”
I squinted at him, but his face was serious. “You gonna let me work it my way?”
“Not a chance in hell. You in?”
“Why not.” It wasn’t like I had anything better to do.
Arthur’s hand tightened on the edge of the bar. “Before you say yes. Happens I need more than just an extra gun.”
“Yes—just on the beach.”
“Oh, I’m so glad!” cried Lexy. “Our old house, where I was born, was on the shore, and on days like this I used to love to go out and walk with father. I love the sea so!”
Captain Grey gave her an odd look, which she didn’t understand. Perhaps that was just as well, for her words and her voice had troubled the young man to an unreasonable degree. He wished he could say something to comfort her. He wished he could offer her the sea as a gift, for instance; and that would have been a mistake, because Lexy did not like to be pathetic.
Just at that moment, however, the taxi turned into a driveway, and there was the house—the Tower. Lexy was disappointed. The name had called up in her mind the picture of a gloomy edifice of gray stone, more or less medieval, and altogether somber and forbidding; and this was nothing in the world but a rather shabby old house, badly in need of paint, and forlorn enough in the rain, but very ordinary and very ugly. Even the tower, which had given the place its romantic name, was only a wooden cupola with a lightning rod on top of it.
Ada had been here, had dropped her phone. To his left, the corridor headed for the fire-stairs. To his right, it led deeper into the mall. If you were an infowar terrorist using this as a base of operations, and you got spooked by a little truant girl being trailed by an R Peed unit, would you take her hostage and run deeper into the mall or out into the world?
Assuming Ada had been a hostage. Someone had given her those infrared invisibility cloaks. Maybe the thing that spooked the terrorist wasn’t the little girl and her tail, but just her tail. Could Ada have been friends with the terrorists? Like mother, like daughter. He felt dirty just thinking it.
His first instincts told him that the kidnapper would be long gone, headed cross-country, but if you were invisible to robots and CCTVs, why would you leave the mall? It had a grand total of two human security guards, and their job was to be the second-law-proof aides to the robotic security system.
He headed deeper into the mall.
Run into the nearest town and get laid or sucked or jerked off. If a soldier didn't have the money to buy it himself, Ray gave it to him. Because there was something essential in the release, something necessary and clarifying in having someone else do it for you. Someone soft and receptive, someone who maybe just pretended to care, but if you bought it, if you contributed to the illusion, that gave it enough weight to make it real. And when they came back to camp late in the night or early the next morning, their eyes were brighter,
their steps more firm, their hands less prone to trembling. Scared, yes. They were still scared, but they weren't desperately scared anymore. Getting laid wasn't going to save their lives on the battlefield, but it gave them a perspective that kept them from making the mistakes by which they might kill themselves.
"I'm not lonely," he says.
"You are. You just haven't realized it yet. You're lonely for me. Lonely and hungry."
If he was lonely-if his loneliness was obvious to someone like Emma, someone he'd just met-what did that mean? What mistakes was he making or essential facts was he missing? How was he not thinking clearly about the tasks at hand?
Sore is my heart and bent my stubborn pride,
With Lijah and with Lisha am I tied,
My soul recoyles like Cora Doctor's Wife,
Like her I feer I cannot bare this life.
I am going to try for the speling prize but fear I cannot get it. I would not care but wrong speling looks dreadful in poetry. Last Sunday when I found seraphim in the dictionary I was ashamed I had made it serrafim but seraphim is not a word you can guess at like another long one outlandish in this letter which spells itself. Miss Dearborn says use the words you CAN spell and if you cant spell seraphim make angel do but angels are not just the same as seraphims. Seraphims are brighter whiter and have bigger wings and I think are older and longer dead than angels which are just freshly dead and after a long time in heaven around the great white throne grow to be seraphims.
I sew on brown gingham dresses every afternoon when Emma Jane and the Simpsons are playing house or running on the Logs when their mothers do not know it. Their mothers are afraid they will drown and Aunt M. is afraid I will wet my clothes so will not let me either. I can play from half past four to supper and after supper a little bit and Saturday afternoons. I am glad our cow has a calf and it is spotted. It is going to be a good year for apples and hay so you and John will be glad and we can pay a little more morgage. Miss Dearborn asked us what is the object of edducation and I said the object of mine was to help pay off the morgage. She told Aunt M. and I had to sew extra for punishment because she says a morgage is disgrace like stealing or smallpox and it will be all over town that we have one on our farm. Emma Jane is not morgaged nor Richard Carter nor Dr. Winship but the Simpsons are.
“No,” Lexy briefly replied.
“Then he went on. He said he had no more of the drug left, and that he’d have to dispose of me. ‘You know you’re very ill,’ he said. ‘The nurse and that young fool of a doctor agree with me. I think you’re likely to grow worse—very much worse—to-night. You’re very likely to die.’ Oh, Lexy! What could I do but agree? I was shut up—so weak and ill— I knew he could so easily give me something to kill me! He said that if I would make a will and sign it as he told me, he would let me go and be—be myself again. I couldn’t help it! And his wife was dead. It couldn’t do her any harm if I signed her name. He wrote it, and I traced it on another sheet of paper. I had to, Lexy! I knew it was wrong, but what else could I possibly do?”
“Never mind, Caroline!” said Lexy. “It didn’t do any harm, dear. And then did he let you go?”
An odd smile came over Caroline’s face.
“Not exactly,” she said. “After I’d signed the will, leaving him the emerald, he sent away the nurse. Then he came out on the balcony, sat down, and began to talk to me. He was so pleasant and kindly! He made plans for my getting away unnoticed, and brought me some sandwiches and a cup of tea. He said I would have to eat a little, or I wouldn’t have strength enough to go. It was getting dark then, and he couldn’t see my face. I pretended to believe him, but I knew all the time. He kept urging me to hurry up, and to eat the sandwiches and drink the tea. I knew ! I had made the will, and now, of course, I had to die. I tried to think of a way out; and at last, when he saw that I didn’t eat or drink, he spoke out plainly. He said that he had sent the servants away for the afternoon, and that we were alone in the house. He got up; he stood there and looked down at me.
“I reached her. Told her to lie low. She’s going to her friend’s, Dr. Martinez’s—says she’s safe.”
“Good.” Well, unless Dr. Martinez was the one responsible for all this, I reminded myself. Fuck. I pushed my fingers against my throbbing temples. The violence was escalating so quickly...“Why wouldn’t they have just killed Halliday in the first place?”
Arthur flinched. “From what you said about deciphering the math, maybe they knew they might need her. ’Sides, the authorities would investigate a murder. They must’ve figured intimidation would work better.”
“And if they kill us, it doesn’t connect back to Halliday if no one knows about the proof, because there are a thousand other good reasons people might want one of us dead. Plus maybe killing us intimidates her more,” I said, thinking aloud. A ploy like that could have worked out very well for them, if they hadn’t failed at the killing-us part. “How did they even know she talked to us?”
“Ain’t no stretch to think they’re watching her. They track my license plate, find out I’m a PI...”
Then I spotted it. The ribbon cable that connected the keyboard to the logic-board wasn't connected right. That was a weird one. There was no torque on that part, nothing to dislodge it in the course of normal operations. I tried to press it back down again and discovered that the plug wasn't just badly mounted -- there was something between it and the board. I tweezed it out and shone my light on it.
There was something new in my keyboard. It was a little chunk of hardware, only a sixteenth of an inch thick, with no markings. The keyboard was plugged into it, and it was plugged into the board. It other words, it was perfectly situated to capture all the keystrokes I made while I typed on my machine.