Empire Games Series, Book 1(58)
Being at semiliberty felt strange after months on a training course and two weeks in a clinic, like release from an unusual incarceration. On the train, she whiled away a couple of hours catching up with her FB friends: seeing who’d changed jobs, married, gotten ill, had babies, gotten cats. But there was something curiously distancing about observing her ex-classmates from college and high school at this remove, as if she were watching them in a zoo, from the other side of a wired glass window. It felt dishonest. I’m on my own, she realized. When she’d been struggling for acting gigs and casual employment, she’d just been another Generation Zer. But now she was locked into something much larger, a cog in a huge, invisible machine. Even if she broke security and tried to explain herself to her friends, most of them wouldn’t understand: they’d be like dogs barking at a lecture on the semiotics of Shakespeare. If they did understand her, it would be even worse. It would mean they were wolves in the night, hunting for security leaks.
When FB got old, she logged on to a couple of geocachers’ boards. But then second thoughts arrived. She had a job that involved working for professional paranoids. It had been bad enough explaining geocaching during that polygraph interrogation: what if they were watching her? Worse, what if the watchers didn’t know it was harmless? Geocaching had gotten started as a popular hobby that mimicked old-school tradecraft. Then—as group activities tend to over time—it had gotten more complicated. These days, teams competed to muggle each other’s caches and intercept cyphered communications in travel bugs; it looked so like the real thing that the risk of coming to the attention of people with absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever could not be discounted, just as one who works for the post office might want to rethink the wisdom of using photographs of their coworkers as targets on the firing range.
Rita was beginning to realize that the DHS had inadvertently dropped a neutron bomb on her social life, destroying her personal relationships—even her hobbies—but leaving the bare-walled buildings of her experiences and skills intact. It didn’t hurt: like waking up to a tooth with a dead root that hadn’t succumbed to infection yet, the pain lay in the future.
The next morning, she repacked her bags, checked out, and headed for the office address she’d been given. It turned out to be located in yet another anonymous concrete ten-story cube, part of the constellation of government buildings that had sprung up in Baltimore as government overflowed from the downtown D.C. fallout zone.
She wasn’t sure what to expect of her posting at first. What she found was an office building shared between a bunch of DHS back-end divisions: everything from procurement services to HR and IT support. But there were uniformed officers at the front desk, sitting under a huge gold-fringed flag, and they were expecting her. “Please spit here, ma’am,” said one of the guards, proffering a tube. Rita spat to order. “Thank you. Please take a seat and wait over there while we authenticate you, ma’am. Bags go on the belt.”
There were DNA scanners everywhere. Fly’s-eye arrays of webcams goggled from the corners of the ceiling. The turnstile led to an area with X-ray belts for bags and T-wave booths for bodies. Her phone rolled over onto a red FEDERAL OVERRIDE network ID instantly. Nobody wanted terrorists to be able to bring phone-controlled bombs into federal buildings, not after 7/16. Not that smartphones or fatphones had existed back then, or that the terrorists who nuked D.C. had used phones of any kind at all, but—Rita flashed back to her own kidnapping and felt a sudden spike of remembered terror and pain.
“Ma’am?” Rita looked up, broken out of her reverie. “Your badge is ready.” She approached the desk. “Fingerprints, please.” She spread her hands on the glass plates. “This is your visitor badge. Wear it at all times and go where it tells you. If you lose it or it’s taken from you, report to security immediately. You may now proceed to security screening, then go to room W4. The badge will show you the way. Do not cross any red lines on the floor or try to enter any doors the badge shows in red.”
Rita took the smart badge and lanyard, looped it round her neck, and managed a weak smile: “Thanks.” She flipped the badge so she could see the animated arrows on the map display on its backside, and followed them down the rabbit hole. At least the security checkpoint here was less overloaded than the ones at Penn Station.
Room W4 turned out to be a conference room on the fourth floor. As Rita let herself in, her phone vibrated. She stared at the message from Colonel Smith: Running late, be with you in 30. “Huh,” she said under her breath. There was nobody around, just a conference table and a sideboard with a coffee vending machine. Hurry up and wait.
Smith took closer to an hour than thirty minutes to show up. “Sorry I’m late: I was in a meeting with the boss.” He glanced at her suitcase. “You’ll need that. Everything packed? Excellent, let’s go.”
“Where are we going?” Rita asked, hurrying to keep up with him as he headed for the lift to the parking garage.
“It’s called Camp Singularity, and it’s in time line four.” Elevator doors closed around them. She saw herself and the Colonel in the walls of the lift, reflected to infinity by a wilderness of mirrors. “You’ll be staying there for a couple of days.”
“More training?”
The elevator doors opened onto concrete and cars. “Not exactly: more like a background briefing. Stuff we want you to be aware of.”