"Promise, but a reckoning: Challenges fill our days.
For the person who wants to live free, they must be and will be overcome, if we are not overwhelmed."
President Harrison C. Resident, 2028
President Harrison C. Resident, 2028
"As usual, we caution here at Nighttime News & Views that it's never clear
that what you are hearing means what you think...
We simply present the best facts that we've gotten."
Susu Starks, NN&V, 2054
We simply present the best facts that we've gotten."
Susu Starks, NN&V, 2054
Her name no longer was even formed in letters as it zipped along the
synapses spread out across the floor of the cold huge room. It was all but
weightless there. Yet zipped it did, with tiny bursts of power. High up
on the dark walls, tightly packed rows of glass nubs sat mute.
A few decades earlier, the small lights would have blinked on and off, a
pulsing sea of blues and reds, signaling their competence. But by the time her
name passed then, they had long sat silent. With not even a twinkle of reflection –
just bearing inanimate watch over the steady shsssh-ing pulse of the billions of
trillions of units of pure fact jumping across the browned pink growing below.
Slithering across the spongy bottom of the room at incredibly fast speeds
flowed more pure knowledge than would have been available when putting
together all of the brainpower of all of the generations that had ever lived until
then. Times 800.
Including her name: Dahlia.
It was decomposed into its parts, in the language of a living network. Not as
letters, but memory pieces, the slivers of thoughtksets. A copy of reality placed so
very long ago: Her forename and what she hid. HP2-99K. And what so many of
us did.
—HP2-99K—
They had called it out the night before.
"Dahlia! Dahlia! Dahlia Resident Brown!" they shouted as she had stood up
before the latest gathering of her "chosen" charity, the Herbert C. Resident
Library Foundation. "We adore you."
The venue: the library itself, a building of decorum and respect behind an
exterior more fit for a municipal-owned office. The structure was one of the
bedrocks of her very own Green County, North Dakota, had been for the last 15
years.
The HCRL Foundation, of course, used it for all of its meetings, which occurred quite frequently. And several nights a week there was a series of different children’s clubs, some sponsored by their host, some not. People came to book and religious study groups, addiction meetings, and strange hobbyists sometimes gathered there.
The library additionally filled its calendar sporadically as one of the county’s substitute hallowed ground, such as if religious events otherwise at the International Victory Church two blocks over, or some of the cross-town mosques and temples, overwhelmed their fire-code capacities. Like occasionally with the sudden national or local tragedy, or especially holy times.
A lot of the people who lived in the area passed at some point through the library’s wood-panel halls. They greeted each other warmly. Talked about the local schools and taxes. Met new friends and former lovers. Told stories about the local stores, posted notices on the flashing touch-screens. It was that kind of stately small-town place in a friendly small town; such pleasantness was plentiful.
That night – the night of Dahlia’s speech and eve of her name’s emergence from its thoughtkset cocoon – some foundation members, as usual for such events, brought their children out with them. And some came with small packs of squirming associated children, the typical piles of soft-baked cookies as a draw.
Many of these kids hadn’t even been alive when Dahlia was at the height of her fame, constantly in the news. Back then her persona was built among those who would never truly know her of several well-remembered looping blips of her life, as more or less is the case of every First Daughter or Son.
That night, through the various speeches for foundation members and friends, each girl in the crowd at some point took her turn wearing a scowl, for no apparent reason at all. Dahlia Resident Brown, the beaming speaker before then, had done it herself once and didn’t notice it now.
"Dahlia, whooo!" their mothers called, the hearty applause that brought the community pride finally dying down. "I love your family, darling!" one boomed.
Dahlia stood tall, tense in her muscles but calm in her mind.
"And this is why I’m here tonight," she told the loving group, her amplified voice never far. "The good grace of your friendship for myself, and my father. And our Foundation. This library and everything it stands for. Charity. Compassion. Respect."
She looked sharp in a stiff suit, striped in nearly identical shades of deep reds.
Only six or seven chair-backs peaked out amid the otherwise energized crowd before her – for a second, Dahlia thought she saw one of her favorite constellations. An overweight man shifted in his seat, and it vanished.
"Together," she said loudly, falling into a fast rhythm, "we can do things to stop suffering, heal wounds here in our community, and build a better future. You know it. I know you know it. We may be a small voice, but my father’s voice started small, too."
"And, to paraphrase Harry Truman, he didn’t get there by giving anyone hell. He just told the truth and they just thought it was hell."
She paused, exhaling, and soaked in the clapping turned thunderous by the auditorium’s arched ceiling.
There was no reason for her to get too worked or nervous, Dahlia told herself again. She hadn’t been raised to feel that way about this kind of thing. She looked down at the lined yellow square in the small glass rectangle in front of her.
Her tall and handsome husband, Mike, looked on lovingly from the wings of the lecture-oriented stage. His hand rested on their daughter’s neck. A few black clips of neatly trimmed hair sat on his shirt collar, a half-baked Morse code gone haywire. She could see that his face was still moist with shaving cream, and felt the memory of his fingers resting beneath her own fluffed hair. She turned to her family and smiled, a bright and confident grin.
In the crowd was the same approval; she had always meant to be a good candidate. She was like her father.
A few rows out, a woman in a tan jacket with the emblem of the library patched onto its shoulder reached over and adjusted upward the ponytail on her own daughter’s neck.
They were on the same page in their modest lives, Dahlia thought. Only Dahlia—luckily for her, she knew—could walk out of the night’s event into one of the nicest hoover-cars in the parking lot. Only, Dahlia was married to among the steadiest of men, and had an always-loving daughter like Stacey. Only, Dahlia had the charmed life. They both, however, had their own annoyances, plenty of them, her and the tired-looking woman in the jacket with the Foundation patch. Both counted their blessings.
Dahlia looked out to the back of the auditorium. “If I ask you to start feeling good, with me, would you join up?” she asked.
“Of course you would,” she smiled. “What if I ask you to start giving back? Can I hear you say you would? The program that I’m going to lay out for you tonight needs that from you. Our Foundation needs that from you. And I’m happy to say I believe we have a strong enough organization to make it work, I expect it can, I know it.
“Which is why you need to support me, Dahlia Brown, when you vote in the upcoming HCRL election. Don’t throw your vote away, because I won’t throw away the opportunity you give me away.”
It was a lousy speech in an inconsequential place, but good enough for every person in the room.
—HP2-99K—
And yet, her name would also soon be elsewhere, traveling across the membrane, roiling the huge brain that powered the neural grip on time behind the database. Making no sound save for a single, undetectably small and quick flick of air that would be only discernible joined up with more of the same.
Across the country, Dahlia, the thought of her human appellation, not person or even the letters, zipped along in the near-black room.
In front of it raced the essence of the phone call it’d been said on, placed June 2, 2026, to Sheik Mustafa Whaleed Jumar. A few hundreds of pieces of potential identification information were pushed by a still surprisingly steady program. The main coder himself was long-since forgotten except for here, in his creation. Like would happen if his own name was ever dragged again to being, “Dahlia” came after dates, locations, names, and affiliations.
Embedded truths and best guesses swelled the tissue around it.
Then came the first hellos.
Then the rest of the conversation followed, and her name pulsed by again, so quick that you’d never know it. Other conversations with Jumar sat back along some of the shifting branches of electrical webs, charging slightly in the grayish folds. All went by at dizzying speeds. Arranged neatly near were related files of memories that no longer were, about Dahlia Brown née Resident, and others with her surname, and variations. And variations of variations.
None of this throbbing could be seen by the human eye, or even one working with a greatly magnified image, though experts were engaged in projects on it. On slowing thoughts after the fact.
Only one thoughtkset, a series of the tiniest of things, among it all contained the voice of the president, Herbert, her father, on a call saying the name of his daughter in such a state. Or Jumar’s, saying the name of his friend’s with such concern.
“dahlia you say ohhh hem what now”
“yeah well you were saying about your daughter musti… the thing with the traditions and i just”
“i see something… something is truly wrong”
Jumar asked at the time, with a gesture commanding his respectful brother-in-law out of the spacious room in his own host’s giant marbled house.
“it is jumar it is”
“that’s not a good thing to hear”
The sheik’s wave banished the squeal of pseudo-religious pop music to behind the thick wooden door. He pulled his robe up, clenching the folds lightly, and stepped deeper into the room.
“girls will be girls… she’s not a girl anymore and we all know that but she really did it this time it’s breaking me up jumar let me tell you it’s… it’s… three week since i haven’t thought about it for a minute three um four weeks you won’t believe how upset liv is”
“hmm i can tell by your tone herbert my friend mister president… hmm yes please tell me what has happened”
“how long have we known each other… your family’s known mine a long time longer than i can remember”
“quite a long time yes yes… that is why i have had you call today, you know i want to work together for your country’s future on every project like this… or anything like it either of us can find and unlike some of my countrymen i can include things in that category not necessarily even the most profitable for us because of our friendship yes… you are as good as the family you come from”
“that’s the problem…musti.. .your brothers your morals… but i’m not sure if i tell you you know how…. you’re going to react and all… and you must promise you’ll never tell anyone”
“everything will be ok i promise my word… right if you can’t believe my word what are we even umm… really what are we talking for anymore”
—HP2-99K—
It took less than an instant for the thoughtkset later known as HP2-99K to race fatefully from the darkened room to the small bearded man sitting back in his chair who heard the call crackling to life around him.
Matthew Hemlock was gnawing on a lonely lunch consisting of a crusty sandwich and pears, lost in thought. He’d been wearing his half-smile that some confused for a smirk. And then, it arrived. Her name. And what she did.
From more than 1,200 miles away, after almost 26 years of near-nonexistence, it popped back up less than two dozen miles from where the President had blurted it all out to his loyal long-distance friend, slowly loosening his tie lower and lower as he paced.
The voices, both tinny and full of bass, echoed off the crumbs resting on the identification badge in the rolls of Hemlock’s shirt. His eyes closed for a minute and he tried to guess at some taste beneath the bread. As the conversation hummed, at first he got no more alert to what he was hearing, even as he further smoothed out the light popping and crackling, as he did by habit, and with ease.
But he became steadily more and more aware, quickly. He had to, if he was ever going to think again in his life of Dahlia and her name, as the drama moved past quickly.
The scene would have been lost again probably forever if he hadn’t.
The thoughtkset that brought the sounds was later known simply by the first and last three digits of its neural log. Visual details of the conversations were by then lost all but completely in the first brains that held them, in the dead sheik and former president.
Hemlock’s head turned to the side as he began following the words. Shaking off the dullness of the silent evening, he felt startled and mistaken. But that was what the day had brought him.
—HP2-99K—
Certainly at the time, Dahlia had rarely ever seen her father – and Herbert had rarely found himself – flustered. And he essentially never would be in his life.
That was part of what made him a great man, or better enough than others for his time to be a leader.
He looked in person the part of his warm stoic tone, with his auburn hair patted down in a perfect part on his head, his glare magnetic but not sensual. With his knotted tightly ties, he might as well have been an oil portrait of himself. The even confidence that milled around the President was an emotional state that Hemlock almost never offered to the world. Which would prove unfortunate in a way.
Tiresome political operatives like Resident’s impromptu host that muggy summer day in 2026? That self-confessed “former twerp” posturing mid-conversation behind the glass of the doors? Policy makers all knew the type, who swaggered gamely in political clout in the split second between amassing it and losing it. And got wealthy along the way that sustained them ever after.
They demanded favors and doled out criticism, and eventually expected to get what they wanted, finding even the slightest inconvenience in the Federal eRegister to be an affront.
Few of them troubled the president in the least, and that’s what made Herbert good at what he did; he was skilled at making them work on his behalf, and his country’s too, at times.
Bullshit was his job. Getting things done. Keeping his cool and playing all sides. Herbert grinned and shook their hands and once he parted his lips, it was like a faucet opened gently. Whomever it was he was addressing. He’d been raised for it, whether and it seemed like no big deal in North Dakota or Washington, Brussels, Virginia, New York or Singapore.
It’d be hard to imagine how accustomed to aggressive friendliness in pursuit of goals that Hebert had become.
He was a patient man, surpassed perhaps by his dignified wife alone.
Only toward the end did it become a talent – being able to wade through life with a man’s smile – that he lost, as can be understood. And then he gave up on trying in the moments he realized it was missing.
—HP2-99K—
Across the globe were plenty of other situations that June that deserved deep attention, of course: War, economic crisis, the death of a boy that had captured the attention of the nation, Herbert’s own friends turning into enemies in more than a few cases. More numerous serious causes of fear than any one man could count. Herbert would have never had tried; select forgetting was a way he learned how to deal. He pictured his own brain’s cartography with firm borders.
Seeing the darkened kitchen past his large collared host, he finished his lemonade with a grating noise. Herbert realized he had missed lunch. He had skipped it to place the call, saying there was an inbound request from a senior foreign official. In truth, he desperately needed to reach a man who would one day head another state, and felt his breathing quickening and a wave of surreal dread when a few minutes after he left a message, his call was returned.
Herbert’s stomach turned thinking about the ugly details, of the situation thrust upon him by Dahlia, of the ripples across her family, his family. His life was flooded over in misery, in every meaning of the word, from top to bottom.
He was maintaining a certain composure, no doubt. But he was, in truth, very disturbed, and only doing so well because of successive rounds of shock and scotch. And he had never been a drinking man. His grin and shake were a little less firm; if someone looked for it they might have noticed. His eyes became unfocused. He couldn’t even begin to try to understate the depths of his wife’s true feelings; Liv could barely talk at all. It also broke his heart.
It was the type of calamity that his second-best fundraiser could never help President Resident solve. Showed how much the stiff clod was worth at the end of the day. None of them was a match for little, stupid Dahlia, who basically upended his second term completely in secret. Dahlia, whom he loved and who would take his legacy on decades further. He was so very upset, beyond upset. Her mother’s tears pinched sharply in Herbert’s chest as he thought about them, and he found himself wincing.
If you were a person who had children and any compassion, you’d understand. Probably.
"You’re not going to believe this… must not… this one… I mean like we hmm were talking about the stupid things your Noreen has done right but Dahlia’s really done it don’t… don’t think you can believe how she mucked it up bigger… bigger than you can imagine."
When Hemlock wasn’t trapped in his small glass office, he liked to tell jokes, mostly successfully, the people he worked with agreed. Those colleagues, who weren’t necessarily his friends, also knew he veered into manic giddiness from time to time. So, even if his patter did seem occasionally off, they generally liked him.
He was who he was, they thought. A lot of them had found the unnerving stillness of the office prompted unusual behavior, and his sloppiness matched his beard.
Deep down, and they maybe could tell from his awkward cadence, there was bitterness in his longing for companionship and punch-lines. Behind his itchy face was a side of him prone to fits of setting its own schedules of moods for his day.
Along with his biology there were several pieces of his history: Being a stern Naval officer’s son and his father’s subsequent career frustration; his brother’s shame and early death; Hemlock’s own lifelong romantic misadventure; and apparently, his unfortunate cowlick.
There were many things in the everyday, too; still, the spells of self-doubt sometimes gave way to hopeful gladness and then the occasional dumbness that reflected his nature. The creeping center of his being just had him wound up to be who he was, which is what he was. That included his strange sense of humor.
Hemlock rarely showed the full nature of his dull unwanted seething, even to himself. Tried hard not to dress like a soured or confused person. Tucked his shirt in completely, rolled his pants to the appropriate place on his slim calves. Kept his hair unmussed and himself ingratiating, for the most part.
Hemlock sat in his glass cube, fingers hovering over the keyboard. He knew it was wrong, knew he shouldn't. But the thrill of power, of knowing something no one else did, it was intoxicating. He thought of his brother, disgraced and dead. Of his father, bitter and broken. Of all the times he'd been passed over, ignored.
Well, not anymore. With this, he'd be somebody. He'd matter. His finger descended on the key, setting in motion a chain of events that would shatter lives and shake the nation. And for a moment, just a moment, he felt alive.
The thoughtksets flowed through his fingers like water, each one a potential bomb waiting to explode. He was an ant in the hill, sure, but an ant with access to the queen's secrets. The gorilla-walking boss could go free-ball himself for all Hemlock cared.
He paused, thinking of Dahlia. She didn't deserve this, not really. But then again, did any of them? The world was a cruel place, and he was just playing by its rules. Besides, he rationalized, people deserved to know the truth about their leaders.
As he prepared to send the information, a small voice in the back of his mind whispered that this wouldn't fill the void inside him. That tomorrow, he'd still be Matthew Hemlock, lonely and bitter. But he silenced it. This was his moment, his chance to matter. And he was going to take it.
His hands trembled slightly as he input the final commands. The weight of what he was about to do pressed down on him. He thought of his father, of how proud he'd been when Hemlock got this job. What would he think now? But it was too late for second thoughts. The information was out there now, racing through the digital ether.
Hemlock leaned back in his chair, a mix of exhilaration and dread coursing through him. He'd done it. He'd changed the course of history. But as the initial rush faded, a new feeling crept in - a cold, creeping fear. What had he really done? And more importantly, what would happen next?
—HP2-99K—
"Herbert that I understand."
Then the desultory truth spilled out, keeping the rising waters inside him from drowning him.
—HP2-99K—
When Hemlock got giddy, he tried all types of jokes. Actual jokes. Long story jokes. Intricate-punch-line jokes. Corny jokes. Gross jokes. Dirty jokes. Inside jokes. Zingers. Quick puns, Yo Momma-stuff, Emoticon Laces to E-Messages. Aircar pranks. Even knock-knocks. It wasn’t always actual jokes, but mostly, though there were times he just put himself out there zanily. Few called him Matt, and he encouraged it, largely, some ventured, because he decided it made him seem less funny, more normal, more exposed. That was not true.
Hemlock was a sponge, he hoped, to what they thought hilarious.
They didn’t always notice him. And he didn’t always want them to. And then there were other times when he fit in.
“Knock, knock?” he once asked a shy new co-worker, snatching a pastel tissue box from where it hugged the netscreen on her desk.
“Heeey, whatcha up to there, Hemlock?” she frowned.
“Knock, knock?”
“Right, really.”
“Knock, knock?”
“Okay, who’s there?” she’d responded, half hopeful.
“Atch.”
“Atch, who?”
“Bless you,” he said, tossing the box gently at her.
“Not bad,” she giggled slightly, weighing how grateful she was for a break from the monotony.
“Not bed, either, right? Get it? That’s where you should be with that cold.”
“Right.”
“You seemed a bit down.”
He did like her, actually, and most people, too, in truth. It was ironic, he thought, that he could be so negative and yet so friendly.
“Was actually. Thanks for noticing, Hemlock.”
“And now?”
“I’m talking to you.”
He studied the recent picture of the girl and her friend blinking on her screen, and from it, lightly off the walls.
“Well…”
“Better than the alternative?”
She smiled. It was.
—HP2-99K—
Young enough still not to be considered old, with lush waves of dark hair like her mother and a twinkle all her own, Dahlia still often raised men’s pulses. In her early forties, she carried herself with a grace that belied her tumultuous past but couldn’t suppress its effects on her aura.
Her natural good looks had hung around too. To many in Green County, it was getting to look like she never would lose them.
To be sure, they had been transformed more than a bit by motherhood – on the scales, she was easily at least a third larger than when she’d left the Ivy League. At least while in clothing, however, her older body plumped out, rather than sagged. She looked fit, if more mature. Too much nightlife early in life probably was part of the both problem and solution for her. Some of her bloat was the legacy of it, but her face was free from the touch of worry.
Quite simply, a good deal more people liked her than didn’t, based on appearances. Her husband, Mike Brown, certainly felt their approval. And he liked it.
He was a lawyer. A slave to clients and billable hours, but passionate in his free time. Yet, in more ways than not, he was easygoing, in that North Dakota way. He had met Dahlia at a political dinner of some sort, where he was representing his firm quite clumsily, and married her within two years. Each had been approaching the age where courtship is either quick or cut off, and each clearly felt ready to start a family with the other.
Mike was a very likable guy, and finding paper pushing to be getting old for its own sake. Dahlia was a likable gal, and slowing down her partying quite seriously already. Who knows if they had met years before…
The fact that Dahlia was who she was, of course, did have something to do with his initial fascination with her. Nevertheless, it was, in truth, low on the list of her finer points. There was little public perception of Dahlia anyway – her brother had, back in the day, been the interesting one – so he found himself not really distracted by such issues. She had plenty of other obvious enchantments. He was sure if she had continued her push, in a few weeks the foundation would finally elect her chairwoman. He was glad it was something for her to put her charms to work at for a while.
Coming back from a less eventful meeting a few weeks earlier – one without any speeches – Mike had caught himself eying some of his wife’s finer points.
Their daughter, Stacey, was in the back seat, flipping through a children’s book about politics, or, more specifically, the three branches of government, laid out in a rudimentary way. Mike didn’t think it was something either he or Dahlia had bought, but it seemed harmless enough.
Stacy spent more time treating it as a drum pad, looking out the window, anyway.
Even compared to his wife, whose sole political outlets were the library and an occasional anti-something-bad speech during Anti-Something-Bad Month, Mike took pains to avoid the ugly tide of campaign junkies. Members of his wife’s family and family friends in fact were beneficent beyond belief toward his family, and Mike appreciated that they understood their passion wasn’t his own.
They were fine people, too, for a barbecue and beers, and he was happy to have them over, and let them talk their talk. That much, he could support.
Unlike her brother, Luther, who no one ever saw anymore, Dahlia tried to move in the old circles, not so much to uphold the Resident name as to show some respect for it. Some of Mike’s outside friends and law partners would also pop up in the gathering, even at the D.C. dinners they returned to occasionally, after both had long been gone from there. But to Mike, a corporate debt lawyer who tried to avoid the fray, all of it was pure occasional entertainment, nothing more. Like a sport he didn’t truly care about.
—HP2-99K—
Herbert himself only had very brief moments of lucidity left. He had been one of the oldest presidents, simply as fate would have it. Sadly, his wife, Livia, always a first lady in his book, had died years before. The especially good days were the ones in which he didn’t think about her at all. If he did, often they would have to tell what happened all over again. When he could remember to, he felt lucky Livia had found Marta for him. Dahlia, and her much older brother, Luther, were getting on with their own lives.
They would always love him, he knew, but they weren’t around much. Marta’s aunt had worked in the White House for a number of terms, thanks to the Residents. She had a deep background in elder care. She was gentle. Intelligent. Committed. Quiet. That much a man of his former stature could manage to still have at his old age.
Despite protests by Dahlia and other members of his family, Herbert had decided to never leave his ranch home in the spiny-peopled hills of Arizona. If he was too old to be there, he was too old to be anywhere else, he had argued.
No need to burden friends or confuse other senior sufferers in a home with his presence, he had believed.
Or at least that’s what he had thought several years earlier, when his awareness of Marta’s care didn’t overwhelm any awareness of his surroundings. It was a retirement palace he had dreamt of much differently. She moved him from room to room, there were two dozen, many studded with photos proclaiming his fame. Some seemed completely new each day.
He was in no shape to say what was best, but he was fairly happy. He had insisted on eating nothing but steak for a while when he was still feeding himself. Marta did not always allow for it but gave in fairly often if he would take care of the rest of his health routine without resisting.
He pretended to read sometimes. Any books presented to him. Some days, more recently, when he didn’t feel comfortable getting out of bed, he masturbated. It was never much of a focus when he was younger, but, the handful of pills people his age took would keep his organs down there functioning for as long as his heart, as long as 130 years.
In both moments of confusion and clarity, the pleasuring of himself seemed to make sense. Asked one day by Marta why he chose to waste his time like that, Herbert Resident responded by saying, “ruling the world was no longer an option.” It was something he would have said tongue-in-cheek when he was younger, certainly if he was still in his 80s. It was no longer clear.
—HP2-99K—
Hemlock had been reminded of his status when, just before arriving, he saw a colleague he somewhat knew. He had shared several conversations with him, quite randomly, a few years earlier. In the hallways, at office gatherings, here and there. They never worked together, but as he had ducked beneath the neogothic arch at the building’s (hopefully unassuming) entrance, Hemlock’s mood brightened and he thought he would renew the conversation.
“Hey there again,” he said to the other worker, whose name was Jeff Something, as far as Hemlock could remember. “If it isn’t you…”
The other man, Jeff, the slick handsome type out of romance books or spy thrillers, looked startled. A moment later, recognition crossed his face. He tossed the corners of his jacket in front of him, so that they fell more neatly on his hips.
“Oh, and you, you. It’s been a while. Hello, yourself.”
“Maybe at the project initiation/Christmas party, if not after then. Leaving for the day?" Hemlock asked, assuming the answer.
“That’s right,” the other man responded. “You?”
“On my way in.”
They both pondered whether to initiate a handshake belatedly.
“No reason to like that.”
“Well, it is the first day before my weekend.”
“That’s right. You do one of those IRHT positions.”
“Let’s just say, I drink a lot of coffeesoda.”
“A Friday’s a Friday. Yeah, I just finished up, but I’m back in the coal pit tomorrow, you know how it is…”
“Tell me about it. Been a long week, lot of little buggers to iron out of the brain wrinkles.”
“You know, I always wondered: Do you find that fulfilling, fixing bugs in the systems? Only engaging actual intelligence once in a while? You know I almost took that job once. I told you that right. But, my goodness, the intelligence is so damn addicting… Not that it doesn’t have its downside.”
“Sure, you told me that.” Hemlock brightened. “Remember, I asked you to put the shoe on the other hand? Have I told what they’ve got us doing now yet?”
“These fucas have decided they want to remove more of the manual oversight of system work. And my arsehole boss, remember the one who does the gorilla walk, he’s got the idea that means we need to do special projects to make ourselves worthwhile.”
“I feel insulted he doesn’t think our normal work is special enough. Anyway, I think he’d much rather fire us.”
“Him? Isn’t that up to his bosses?”
“Basically, they all think we’re paid too much.”
“They can’t fire you, of course. Against the rules.”
“You’d think they should really, though, let some of us go,” Hemlock said. “I’m far from overpaid – I live in a hogdamn one-room, right? But you’ve got to know that there’s too many of you, when you’re nearly three years done with a five-year cataloging program project three months in.”
“You don’t actually seem that upset.”
“I’m not really, whole thing’s easier than it used to be.”
“Let me tell you, I need my EarNek to be 100% accurate 100% of the time. I’m always thinking about that. I’m not kidding. How do you think I catch the really bad ones?”
“Yeah, well… Listen, do you see the news about what they’re maybe doing over there?”
A slight drizzle began. Hemlock sized up the other man.
Hemlock was a so-called “passive” agent, in the words of an agency chief several years earlier, one of the “foot soldiers who bring strength in numbers… who bring balance and effectiveness.” Jeff was an “active.” They untangled signs of threats, not the administrative messes of bureaucracy and technology.
Like HP2-99K, the terms weren’t officially used in any real sense. But they were widely used to understand the inner workings of the agency, and, for a short period in the past, those of corporate cultures.
Not all active agents went home at decent hours, but Jeff did.
The “news” was bunk. Hemlock was surprised the other man didn’t know. It was far from a secret.
“I think you probably shouldn’t believe what you read there.”
“Yeah?”
“It’s generally bad for your health. No way they win this round.”
The rumor was that half the building was being retired. For that to happen, however, the politicians would have to agree to huge funding increases, by creating a huge organizational revamp.
“Thanks.”
“Listen. I got to check in. Nice seeing you.”
“Likewise.”
The other man took two steps into the mist and threw up his rainbubble. His foot began to squish a bit as he hit the last of the stairs. Hemlock raised his hand, half as a shield, but the other man’s momentum carried him quickly into his turn, and he never looked back.
Herbert thought to himself belatedly a joke he wanted to share.
"Dora… `Dora, who?’ … Dora not open…"
Instead, he took one more look out at the federally tinged landscape.
—HP2-99K—
Down and to the left geographically of his only grandchild, Herbert kept an intentional seclusion.
When he could think to ask, he would tell Marta again to make sure his eager visitors were turned away. She, of course, knew better than anyone. They would come every day, hoping to see the countenance of a man of his stature, of his historical value.
Some were nearly as old as him. Others just old enough to drive their aircars made pilgrims out of it; his critics chuckled that he had been elevated from a modestly successful leader to a cult icon among people who thought something like him, for no good reason.
He probably would have chuckled himself, like he did when his vice president found himself being ridiculed by a mixcontexting of presidential quotes. It went with a very catchy electronic beat.
"This man…
My vice president…
knows how to…
give all of his love …
to the free men of this world…
not his wife nor the other women in the struggle …
Not my wife (laughs) …
Not my wife (laughs) …
and I know that because he told me…
the free men of this world."
My vice president…
knows how to…
give all of his love …
to the free men of this world…
not his wife nor the other women in the struggle …
Not my wife (laughs) …
Not my wife (laughs) …
and I know that because he told me…
the free men of this world."
Herbert was ultimately going to be pretty humble about things. But he didn’t even really know all those people were winding up and down his long driveway; buzzing in and out, simply to get told to go away.
He assumed, but didn’t really know it, like Marta did. He would tell her again to keep them away when he could remember.
The last time one made it in, a bodyguard who remained hidden in the shadows for weeks at a time almost clocked the kid. Instead, Herbert agreed to see him and then drifted away again before he could get in. It was a form of regicide in the poor kid’s mind, one he knew he would never forget.
At the time his conversation with Jumar was bubbling up, he was last visited, during a moment of any awareness, by a former president after him, who came on a quest for personal awareness and asked that his visit be kept a secret. It had been nearly a year earlier.
"Do you think we did good, Resident? Left the country a better place?" asked the other former president, who, unlike Herbert, could very easily take in the majesty of his Southwestern-themed senior palace.
"They tell you there’s a lot of days I can’t remember to even think about any of that, right?"
"When I can I think yes."
"Why?"
"The country’s still around, kid. It’s still up and running. I had my challenges on that front. You, too. We all do."
Pre- HP2-99K, no one was planning on visiting good old number 59 for many, many months, as it happened. He had encouraged it. All that he needed from them was the picture book of Stacey his daughter had sent. He could see a number of traits of his own in her baby pictures.
People who had aspirations, people like Jeff Something or Torver Dowell, the active agent credit who stopped the Phoenix BankcoDome plot shortly after transferring, stayed in Hemlock's department for probably nine months on average. He had been there six years.
His father had spent over 30 years at the Navy, rising up several of its officer ranks, and a decade at its intelligence wing, when he was shuffled out. Without Resident’s Response Restructuring initiative, without the president’s probably overly aggressive push to remake his armed forces into a more air-based attack force, it almost definitely would not have happened.
The initiative, rubber stamped by Congress, put Hemlock’s father in an impossible place, and he did not last long afterward: The cuts to the naval forces, the ships and their navigators, eventually sliced into the ranks of the admirals, and forced retirements followed. It ultimately was why his father, Admiral Kilgore Hemlock, for lack of the constitution or aptitude to take on a civilian job like restaurant greeter or computer lubber, found himself moping at home for the last few decades of his life.
What was funny was how he did it.
Unlike his mother’s whine, his father was soft-spoken. He would never want to let his family catch on to his actual mood, even after his other son’s death. Many people thought they saw him cry then, but none actually did.
Adm. Hemlock also never tried to force his bitterness into Hemlock, his only other child. He let his feelings about the hand he was dealt be known, of course, but stopped at that – it was never about what had happened to him, it was a lesson to learn from about the way the world worked. It didn’t matter, Hemlock got the picture, and, in the smallest way, a touch of the attitude.
Yet, when his hands-on supervisor, Maria Morales, stopped by, the younger Hemlock postured himself as totally eager, in any which way he could. More surprising perhaps, he meant most of it. She had been nice to him lately. He had been uninterested in whatever it was he was up to anyway.
He was happy to chat. Joke. Loosen up. She would be gone in a minute if he just let her go on with her business, he knew, so he engaged her head-on with enthusiasm, to make the most of the situation, as he always did. The short form was the best of both worlds.
"You sure you don’t want Trina to take over polishing the code on the Bolivian files? You’re not getting too backed up on your trip work, are you?"
"Are you kidding me?" Hemlock said. "Just got the bombs from the camels."
"Let me know."
"No worries, it’s my pleasure. If you want, I’ll tell you about the accelerators I’ve spliced the code with so far. They’ve taken pretty well in L.Ala. It was a tough one, especially at the beginning, but then I got the idea to …"
"I saw some of it in your last special-project report."
"Yeah?" Hemlock asked.
"Yeah."
"Great. What else is new?"
"My dog was real sick over the weekend," Maria said.
"So, I hear this story the other day. It’s crazy, right. True story. Happened to a friend of my mom..."
"Woman, she’s been living with this seeing-eye dog for 12 years. It’s the greatest. She’s blind, right."
"And after all those years of faithful service, she starts noticing it’s walking into walls pretty regularly, getting spooked at crosswalks."
"She gets a family member to take to her in. He tells the obvious: The dog’s almost blind and getting blinder."
"Man," said Maria, "that’s tough."
"But wait… you know what she does? Remember she’s loved this dog. It’s been her constant for a dozen years, leading her all over the place. On duty, 60-24-7."
"She gets a seeing-eye for her seeing-eye dog. The idea isn’t for the dog… it doesn’t hold the other dog’s leash or anything. He’s just going to walk with them, and keep a lookout. They all go into the clinic and everything, find a dog that’s going to double-time for them, and practice up."
"The next day, the lady gets run over."
Like she did with every employee below her rank – or every "ant in the hill," as she thought of it – his boss eyed the walls of his office for signs of an untidy approach. And the walls, once again, were closing in on Maria.
"Just keep up the good work," she said, ducking back out and eyeing his more-boring cubicle neighbor.
Hemlock went back to a less ambitious version of his duties. Not surprisingly, every two weeks or so, he started to get real bored with his daily functions, and despair set in. It was lonely in his soundproof cube.
Maria was stopping in on a long row of men and women like Hemlock who were untangling knots in the brain pathways that held just about all of his agency’s intelligence. On the far wall, a similar row of glassed-in offices, the day staff’s, sat empty.
Occasionally, his boss’s boss lumbered by. That man weighed more than twice what he should have, maybe three times Maria. When he would stop to talk, he would lean back and let his knuckles balance him upright.
He scared some of Hemlock’s peers. Hemlock just saw him as the schmuck he was: The worst that could happen was he would get another lesson in the finer points of picking up ladies.
Maria was stopping in on a long row of men and women like Hemlock who were untangling knots in the brain pathways that held just about all of his agency’s intelligence. On the far wall, a similar row of glassed-in offices, the day staff’s, sat empty.
Occasionally, his boss’s boss lumbered by. That man weighed more than twice what he should have, maybe three times Maria. When he would stop to talk, he would lean back and let his knuckles balance him upright.
He scared some of Hemlock’s peers. Hemlock just saw him as the schmuck he was: The worst that could happen was he would get another lesson in the finer points of picking up ladies.
—HP2-99K—
Mike, who never thought about Dahlia’s father, thought of her father as her father.
Even with Dahlia’s numerous foundation dealings, she only rarely talked of him as the president. Always as her father. The omission was striking. Mike was doing some work in the one room of the house he allowed any shrine-like character. He sat at eye level with a bust. Even then, he usually remained focused on his family’s current lives, not their reason for fame. The foundation was different – as much as it was about preserving his legacy, it was also about making a real difference in the community through charitable works and education.
He thought about bringing up the idea of a visit to the old man, but they were both so busy already, and upsetting Dahlia stank as an idea in itself. Dahlia checked in with Marta regularly, of course: She said he was the same as he had been, especially in regards to visitors. The word was out, but they just kept coming.
Stacey popped her head in, her momentum carrying her into the room, where she landed on one foot. Doing the cold calculations, Mike realized she should probably see her grandfather a few more times before too long and no one could anymore.
The funny thing was that people said they saw a physical resemblance between his own little ponytailed princess and his father-in-law, the former president, and a political one between Daisy and her father, the current commander in beef.
Stacey tossed him a ball. It shone with a swirl of images; some were personal, others generic.
"Where’d you get this?" Mike asked.
"Mummy got it for me."
Mummy had been getting people a lot of extra gifts recently. Must be campaign season, he thought. He wondered if that would work for him with Dahlia.
Stacey looked up at him. He was still holding the ball. He noticed something. Normally his daughter was a whirl of questions. Yet, suddenly she had gone into radio silence. He looked over at his papers and then handed back her ball.
"Aren’t you curious about something or other?"
She aimed the ball directly at his papers. Then tossed it straight up in the air.
"Aren’t you, curious, daddy?"
"About things?" she continued.
"About what things?"
Stacey: "About living things?"
"Yes."
"About dead things?"
"Yes."
"About things that are things you watch?"
"Yes."
"And things you eat?"
"Yes."
"And other stuff?"
Mike hesitated, sensing something deeper in her voice. "I thought so. Sometimes I wonder about Mommy, though."
He pictured Dahlia, bossing around her election committee down at the library. None of the other 56 candidates for any of the 14 board slates had an election committee. For a good reason: it didn’t pay anything. He wasn’t too worried about her time commitment once the elections were over. Also for a good reason: It would be the same monthly meeting his family attended already.
A good portion of the other candidates could also spend freely, though, which amounted, in fact, to a good portion of the foundation’s annual budget (a manageable, but unseemly 6%). Each could get formal research of their plans for the nonprofit. Most employed New York or San Francisco firms.
The spending was a political innovation Herbert himself had championed, for his foundation and his foundation alone. It was one of his last gestures in the public eye, and a somewhat perplexing one at that.
Yet, the scoring produced some winners, even among hopefuls who failed in the election. One rehoused and reemployed homeless families. One offered debt accounts to the unbanked. One reorganized the entire infrastructure of the foundation itself, improving its accounting and locking in better investment returns.
The other candidates joined Dahlia at the foundation’s offices to see if their plans were back, and socializing, if not.
Her daughter also had some resemblance to her mother, who looked nothing like Resident. “You know how Mom’s always speaking and going to meetings at the library.”
"She does that because she wants to help people. She wants to help them more than a lot of other people who want to help them, too."
"So?"
"So… she’s curious. She’s planning on giving a lot of money to something, I’m not sure exactly what, but it’s really good, I bet. She’s going to give that money away the best."
—HP2-99K—
"don’t don’t … swear herbert… please…"
"I wasn’t going to … well… here’s the thing, friend, you want to help me unload my troubles?"
"Tell me why I shouldn’t swear."
Herbert’s confession about his daughter to Jumar, HP2-99K, the audio from the phone call, was stored on the servers in audio form. In reality, it should have been called:
HP2(AHDP2YUJTSR1JUR6457964DS5M287WAUDJDSHDSUJDIOA965W3DX2A1QQJ2VA333`KNWRE234Z,XJGX,MNHC BVVCU2U728Q90NYA7F1932)99K
EarNek itself was actually the software, the program serving as the ultimate limb for the ultimate collection of human knowledge. That never became obvious to most people.
What made it possible was the servers, first, the yards and yards of genetically grown brain tissue, that had been taught to learn well before Resident arrived in office. It was certainly a program he supported, before as a governor and when in the top office.
Though it never actually came close to being anything near fully operational while he was actually serving – the best that it could index was printed.
Then, again, some might look at the illegal drugs Ms. Resident, who goes by Dahlia Brown today, did and say her mistakes are our children’s, whether it’s legal or not. To say we have
"a thriving illegal abortion problem that we are not fighting aggressively enough, i.e., through legal abortions in some areas,"
as Shawn Navin, of the Women and Men Foundation, an advocacy group, did.
"Or that"
'there’s a reason women have a right to privacy on this issue. They’re putting themselves at stake,'
as Tela Jordan, the radio talker, does.
"Here’s what I got to say to that. If it’s not right, it shouldn’t be happening, and we shouldn’t allow it to."
"As of yet, the sender of this scoop remains unknown. We are told it is absolutely legit, have analyzed the voices, and feel pretty good about the matches."
"We also have a way—a code associated with the clip. HP2 dot dot dot for nearly three dozen digits 99K. Our experts think it may be intelligence agency related."
"As for the sender, we look forward to more if he has any. Or she."
"We’ll go to the break with some photos of boys and girls from the Faith and Hope Club. Some beautiful kids born to some severely addicted mothers."
—HP2-99K—
"Shocking revelations."
Voice 1: "Can you believe that?"
Voice 2: "I know that was legal then, but the truth is, it shouldn’t have been. And either way, this Dahlia chick, of all people, shouldn’t have been doing it."
To some, it felt like an entire political world was crumbling.
Dahlia was devastated at first only about herself. As if she could have really thought about other consequences. She might have acted differently.
She didn’t stop crying for days and remained only in her room. The entire side of their three-story house with their bedroom moaned. Her election committee disbanded temporarily.
Her husband was a terrific man. The type of man that would share in breast-feeding if he could. The type of man that would take a bullet for someone he loved. A terrific husband.
Her husband also was very religious, he realized. He could not stomach the idea of abortion. He was glad not to see her. He was devastated. He couldn’t be angry at her now, but he was angry at her then. How could anything he thought about her not be suspect?
Why her brother Luther turned up now seemed too suspicious. She wondered if he had something to do with the leak. How could her father have been so stupid? Did he know? Somebody must have told him, but would he even remember? Both answers saddened her.
The only thing that she could use to change her mood was thinking of revenge against whoever had targeted her for some ugly reason. Anger gave way to shame very quickly each time, though.
At one point right afterward, her daughter tried to get into her room. There were people outside their house. Lots of people on the lawn. Stacey was scared that they were angry because her mother had not been giving away money "the best."
The door remained locked, and Mike packed Stacey up for a few nights away.
She sensed it was the best option. She overpacked. Mike wondered how bad things could get and so headed over to Church after dropping her off with the mother of a friend, one of their friends. Or his friends, at least.
Stacey Brown, eight years old, sat cross-legged on her bed, surrounded by a fortress of stuffed animals. Outside, she could hear the angry voices, the shouts of reporters. She didn't understand what was happening, only that it was bad. That Mommy was crying and Daddy was angry and the world had suddenly turned upside down. She hugged her favorite teddy bear closer, wishing she could make it all go away. Wishing she could go back to yesterday, when everything was normal. When she was just a little girl, not the daughter of a woman the whole country was talking about.
She picked up her special ball, the one that showed swirling images. Maybe it could tell her what was going on. But all she saw was her own confused reflection. "Rumbp," she muttered, tossing it aside.
A knock on the door made her jump. It was her dad, looking tired and sad.
Mike: "Hey, kiddo," he said, trying to smile. "How about we go for some ice cream?"
Stacey nodded, even though she didn't really feel like it. She just wanted things to be normal again.
As they left, Stacey heard more shouting. She saw flashes of cameras, angry faces. She clutched her dad's hand tighter. Was this what it meant to be curious about things? If so, she didn't like it one bit.
—HP2-99K—
In the car, Stacey stared out the window, watching familiar streets suddenly seem alien and threatening. She thought about her mom, locked away in her room. Why wouldn't she come out? Why wouldn't she explain what was happening? A lump formed in Stacey's throat.
"Dad?" she said, her voice small. "Are we bad people now?"
Mike's hands tightened on the steering wheel. He looked at his daughter in the rearview mirror, saw the fear and confusion in her eyes. How could he explain something he barely understood himself?
"No, sweetheart," he said finally. "We're not bad people. Sometimes... sometimes good people make mistakes. But that doesn't make them bad."
Stacey nodded, not quite understanding, but feeling a little better. As they pulled into the ice cream shop, she hoped that maybe, just maybe, things would be okay again someday.
He prayed there would be nothing more he had to find out. He prayed for the patience to withstand the slings and arrows.
While the woman herself was locked down, in an unclean and prideful suffering, her husband could not escape confronting the dark episode in her life again and again when out in public. Television, radio, everything.
He arrived home and there were more of them than when he had left. He thought he saw the lead partner at his firm, but it was just a look-a-like cameraman.
He made a quick dash.
"No comment."
"No comment."
"No comment."
"No comment."
"Nothing. I have nothing to say."
The foulest things were said. Hearing them all would have been too hurtful.
Mike thought. Inside, as hard as he could strain his ears, there was not a single sound to be heard.
He crossed over to the side she was on, and even when getting close to their bedroom, heard nothing. He knocked, even while unsure what he would say. She let him in.
He joined her in the room.
Her face was puffed out, mostly under the eyes, but all of the rest of it too. Mike thought of Stacey, and thought of their marriage and how good it had been. But he couldn’t help but have the word “betrayal” echoing in his mind.
"I don’t have anything to say to you right now."
—HP2-99K—
There was one other thing about the events talked about in HP2-99K that Dahlia was hoping wouldn’t get out. She was quite unsure who the father of the child had been.
She had been in love with being a lover. At 17, she was a natural cutie that could turn ultra-sexy with her simply pulling up her hair. Obviously, she couldn’t resist the types of young men the combination of charms and privilege could snare. Under-the-radar, she was one of the biggest partiers to ever live at the White House, even if she only really visited, like all the other peons.
Very few knew of it, but that was the First Daughter’s reputation. Some believed the TCRockets’ “History Girl” was about her.
Dahlia’s transition from wild child to respectable mother was a journey of fits and starts, each step forward accompanied by two stumbles back. The White House parties faded into hazy memories, replaced by sleepless nights with a colicky baby. Her ambition and drive remained, but they now had a new focus—proving that she could be more than just the sum of her past mistakes.
Dahlia’s transition from wild child to respectable mother was a journey of fits and starts, each step forward accompanied by two stumbles back. The White House parties faded into hazy memories, replaced by sleepless nights with a colicky baby and the slow, steady rhythm of suburban life. She traded her designer party dresses for sensible slacks and button-downs, her drink of choice shifting from vodka sodas to lukewarm coffee.
But old habits die hard, and sometimes, in the quiet moments between foundation meetings and PTA bake sales, Dahlia would catch herself daydreaming of those heady nights. The thrill of sneaking out, the rush of forbidden kisses, the intoxicating feeling of being young and invincible. She'd shake it off, reminding herself that she was Dahlia Brown now, upstanding citizen and pillar of the community. Still, a part of her wondered if she'd ever truly outgrow being History Girl.
She was 17. The White House corridors echoed with the click of her heels as she snuck back to her room, the taste of cheap beer still on her lips. She'd been out again, living up to her secret reputation as the biggest party animal to ever grace the presidential residence. If only they knew, she thought, smirking at the stern portrait of some long-dead president. His eyes seemed to follow her, judging. She didn't care. She was invincible, untouchable. Until she wasn't.
The next morning, her head pounding like a jackhammer, Dahlia stumbled into the bathroom. She caught sight of herself in the mirror - mascara smeared, hair a tangled mess. "Fuca," she muttered, splashing water on her face. She had to pull herself together before her parents saw her.
As she fumbled for her toothbrush, her phone buzzed. A text from last night's conquest: "Great salad tossing, History Girl." Dahlia felt a wave of nausea that had nothing to do with her hangover. What had she done? It was all a blur.
She heard footsteps approaching and quickly straightened up, plastering on her best First Daughter smile. Just another day in paradise, she thought bitterly. Little did she know, paradise was about to come crashing down.
Her mother's voice called from the hallway, "Dahlia, honey? Are you up?"
Panic surged through her. She couldn't let her mom see her like this. "Yeah, Mom! Just... just getting ready!" she called back, her voice cracking. She frantically searched for eye drops, anything to hide the evidence of her night out.
As she applied concealer with shaking hands, Dahlia caught her own gaze in the mirror. For a moment, she saw herself as others might - young, reckless, spiraling. But she pushed the thought away. She was Dahlia Resident, the president's daughter. She could handle anything. Couldn't she?
Her brother Luther, however, was the one that had gotten in trouble: with drunk-driving and the underage girls. The truth was the first he did, but the girls weren’t even with his group that night. They snuck into the bar and got busted, he went down. Who knows where Dahlia was then.
No one could blame their parents; they forged stronger morals into the country. Gov. Herbert Resident did North Dakota proud on that front in the campaigns. Dahlia knew it was all true. She had been lured by the ease at which the life of illicit pleasure presented itself. She was well prepared to resist as someone could have.
“… she was there… i told her no”
She was and he did.
Dahlia knew it was ridiculous, considering that she had brought it all upon herself. But she was livid at whoever fed the info to Nightrag FuckingCunt News & P.U.s. She hoped they wouldn’t pour salt in her cried-out eyes. They would have to better watch out if they did.
—HP2-99K—
Hemlock’s method of delivery had turned out to be quite obvious once he had again run across Jeff Something, the active agent.
Hemlock didn’t trust the man could ever be a friend, but he knew he could help. Jeff knew things about secrets. Hemlock was coy, but ready for the conversation to flit by where he needed it to go. Halfway through, he realized he hated doing it, not sure why exactly Jeff’s handsome face made him so uncomfortable.
He had seen his chance after Jeff said something about his department’s head giving a promotion to his own ex-wife.
"So, like if she, I don’t know, had something to blackmail with, how would she even go about sending an untraceable message to get it out there?"
"I mean, right? That would totally explain it."
"But she couldn’t risk anyone finding out it was her."
"Why?"
"Because," he said, "you can’t just go around tearing your ex-husband down like that. People would just kill you, too, if it wasn’t the right thing. But he’d have to believe she could."
"Oh, ok, I get you. Well, if I was her, I wouldn’t just message it directly to the news, or whatever, because there’s no way we couldn’t trace it back and dig up who she is..."
"Right."
"And I wouldn’t like just walk into the Nightly News & Views, or even like meet them somewhere, because there’s going to be videos, and even if she wears a mask or, I don’t, big hood, I crack those plenty of times by using vocal or physical or environmental clues."
"But there’s one really easy way if you’re her. I mean, we see it sometimes from the bad guys, so he knows, you can do it easy."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, just steal a phone, record your message and drop it in a crowd, like at a mall or something. That’s how the terrorists sometimes do it. They just wrap it in a note saying, ‘send to news.’ And people do, because like you pick that up and read it and you fuca do."
"She would steal a phone, like just from someone on the street?"
"Yeah, I mean, if she’s really got the goods to screw him. And, let me tell you, used to be a real pain for whoever’s phone it is. I mean, probably still is. They always get just completely investigated in case it is their phone. Like every thoughtsek they have on the EarNek. No privacy."
—HP2-99K—
Hemlock didn't start to feel bad about what he did until the full consequences of his actions began to unfold before him. Whole religions turned against the family.
"You know… it is against our religions, Mustafa, right?"
The president didn't know what he was looking for from his friend. He didn’t know why he called him.
"But not your laws."
"No."
"Livia is locked in the room… crying…"
"A good question two days ago she did it again."
An abortion… my baby. Dahlia."
"Oh…"
"Oh. Oh, baby is right."
—HP2-99K—
Stacey Brown grew up fast in the wake of the scandal, her childhood innocence stripped away like old wallpaper, peeling away in the steam of her confusion.
She became hyper-aware of the whispers that followed her at school, the sidelong glances from teachers who thought she couldn't see. Her classmates, once just kids like her, transformed overnight into potential spies, each friendly overture scrutinized for hidden motives.
In her diary, a physical book that she could hide under a false bottom in her jewelry box, Stacey poured out her confusion and anger. "Why did Mom have to be so stu-pod?" she wrote, using their made-up word for supremely idiotic. "Doesn't she know that moms are supposed to be boring?"
But beneath the hurt and resentment, a seed of understanding began to grow. Her mom wasn't just Mom, and she wasn’t the woman who gave speeches.
She was a person, complicated and flawed, a human being in ways that no
one even knew existed, not even the adults. In ways that Stacey was just learning
could exist. In ways that people were only telling her now could be flaws.
It was a
realization that terrified and comforted Stacey in equal measure, a truth she'd take
with her long after the intensity of the moment faded away. Or rather, after it
became part of history in a realer way, across more brains.