False Hearts (False Hearts #1)(6)
“Vuk,” I say, tasting the name on my lips. The retinal display of my implants tells me the name means “wolf” in Serbo-Croatian. I send the text away. “Why are you telling me this?”
“We want you to come back in tomorrow,” he says. The hardness has left him again. I prefer him without it—it doesn’t suit him. Too forced.
“Why?”
“You’ll see. Please come to the station tomorrow at 0900. Take the MUNI. Come through the back entrance.”
“This is not a request?”
“No.” We’ve reached my apartment. He sets the hovercar down on the balcony. I sigh at the sight of my broken sliding glass door. At least the worst of the rain has stopped.
I get out without saying goodbye, stepping into my damp living room. I turn around, watching Oloyu lift the police car away.
“Vuk,” I say again. “Who were you?” A rich man, if he frequented the club, who liked to plug into the Zeal virtual world fantasies. I can just see a Sudice billboard for Zeal, flashing through the fog. A woman in a Chair, wires hooked up to her arms and temples, eyes closed, a smile on her face. Above her head, her dreams come to life—she’s clad in armour, and fighting a sinuous monster. The billboard blinks again. She’s flipping head over feet, wearing a skintight star-spangled uniform, an Olympic athlete. One last blink, and the tagline: Find your Zeal for life. What will you dream today?
What were Vuk’s dreams when he was plugged into that Chair, and did Tila join him in them?
I look down over the city again, wondering how I’ll find out who he was and how he entangled Tila in this mess.
THREE
TILA
They’ve given me an old-fashioned paper notebook to write my last will and testament, with a pencil blunt enough I can’t kill myself with it. I’m sure I still could, if I wanted to.
I refused a tablet. I don’t want them sneaking and reading this as I write. So here I am, with my paper and pencil. I’m more used to this than most people in the city—out in the Hearth, there are no fancy gadgets and very little technology.
I’m not going to write my last will and testament. What’s the point? I don’t have much to leave and my only next of kin is Taema, so everything goes to her. I couldn’t send any of my stuff to my parents at the Hearth even if I wanted to, since we’re apostate and all that.
So I’m just sort of scribbling, seeing what will come out. It passes the time, I guess. There’s nothing else to do. The cell is cold and boring, with everything gray and beige, though I do have a window that shows a tiny patch of blue sky. Maybe writing this will distract me, at least a little, from the fact they’re going to kill me soon.
There’s no point sugar-coating it—it’ll happen. My lawyer is half heartedly trying to put up a defense, buy me more time, but I don’t know why he bothers. The trial’s in a few weeks. Though can you really call it a trial if there’s no jury, just some judge deciding your fate? The government is keeping it all hush-hush. The media aren’t meant to know—most of the people here don’t even know who I am or what I’m meant to have done. I overheard the guards talking about it. I’m not in a normal prison. They don’t even have prisons in San Francisco anymore, there’s so little crime. I’m locked away somewhere else, but we didn’t travel long so I think I’m still in Northern California. Maybe they took me to the Sierras? The air seems colder and crisper.
If it ever does get out, I wonder if they’ll let me read the news feeds. They’ll call me all sorts of names. Some will be true. Some won’t.
The judge will say I’m a criminal, and then they’ll put me in stasis. Freeze me like a popsicle, and then I might as well be dead. That sounds flippant, I know, but that seems to be the only way I can write about it without crying.
Shit, never mind. There’s tear stains on the paper now.
Putting people in stasis is Pacifica’s answer to capital punishment. They’re not killing them, but cryogenically freezing criminals. It happened a lot more in the early days of Pacifica, after the United States split up. Now, maybe only a dozen people, tops, are put into stasis every year. It’s only for the really hopeless cases, those who don’t respond to Zeal therapy and will never be redeemed. I guess they think I’m unredeemable.
Hardly anyone who goes into stasis comes back out. It does happen—some tireless lawyer will discover someone frozen was actually innocent. They come out of it, disoriented, to find years have passed them by. One woman was taken out after thirty years. Her husband and mother were gone, most of her friends had moved away. She ended up committing suicide, because she felt the rest of her life she got back wasn’t worth living.
How would I react if I was frozen and woke up in fifty years to discover Taema was old and frail, or gone entirely?
I don’t really have to worry about it, though. People coming out of stasis has only happened a handful of times in forty years. Not good odds.
Then there are the outages. Whole wings of people in stasis losing power, and they die before anyone can fix it. So convenient, right? The government always claims it’s an accident. They promise to install a back-up server. Then they never do. One day, I’m pretty sure there’ll be an outage on everyone in stasis. Whoops. Away they go.
Thinking about living without Taema has weirded me out. I can’t get it out of my head. I’m alone in this cell, and my sister’s miles away. I’m still not used to being alone, even ten years after we separated. Tomorrow is our surgery anniversary. Whoo. The first sixteen years of my life were spent looking over my sister’s shoulder, or resting cheek-to-cheek with her to look at someone together.