Killswitch, page 10
“I think I’d like some place a little more quiet,” I said.
“Naturally!” Trino boomed at once. “There’s a lot to do and you’ll need to be fresh. Let’s get you out of this madhouse.” He turned to Brian. “Perhaps the three of us can have a quiet lunch?” His gaze looked just a little too earnest.
“What do you think, Mavo?” Brian asked, and his gaze had a note of caution in it. I took the hint.
“Maybe later,” I said. “Right now I’d just like to, um, decompress.”
Brian’s face lit up. “I think I know a place you’ll really like. Trino, could you take over here?”
“Certainly,” Trino said. “I’ll call Leon to escort you.”
Brian waved the suggestion away. “No, it’s fine. We won’t waste anybody’s time.” There was an almost imperceptible change in Trino’s expression. I didn’t catch its meaning before it melted back into a smile.
“Sure,” Trino said. “I’ll make sure everybody gets refocused. Mavo, you’ve caused a lot of excitement here. It’s good energy. Together we can do great things!” His hand was still on my shoulder. He gave it a hard squeeze before finally releasing me.
“Let’s go, then,” Brian said. We descended the podium into the crowd. I was afraid we’d be overwhelmed, but Brian deftly guided me through the choppy currents of adulation, smoothly opening a path with a glance or a swift nudge of his shoulder.
In seconds we were out of the room. Leon was there and began to step into place behind us but Brian waved him away.
The corridor was empty. The offices leading from it were deserted. Apparently, nearly every Realist in the building had come to see me speak. The fact that a group whose members couldn’t even agree on their own symbol had all decided to listen to me was intimidating.
Flattering too, but scary.
Brian led us out of the hotel. We walked a couple of blocks until we came to a large three-story building in a pre-Collapse style, a jumble of beige blocks. We entered through glass doors set in a wall of windows.
The first thing I noticed was the smell: the slightly musty odor of carpet, varnished bookshelves, old paper and ink. The carpet was a sober gray. A wood-paneled circulation desk stood to one side of the doors. A woman sat there reading a book. She was so absorbed she didn’t notice us.
Light streamed through the windows and from fixtures in the ceiling.
The first floor was a vast open space with chairs and reading tables scattered about and elevators at the back. The tables were empty. Tall shelves at the rear and sides of the building were packed with books— more than I had ever seen in one place. It took my breath away.
Other libraries had audio-visual and Immersion nodes and digital papers, but the only actual books I’d ever seen there were in glass cases.
Brian noticed me gaping.
“It’s been here since the twentieth century,” Brian said. “Always been a library, although it’s only been since Unity that they restocked it with books. It’s sort of a reenactment center. The books are real. You can even check them out, although hardly anybody does.”
He led me into the center of the open space, and I noticed there were several wings. We passed one carpeted in a colorful checkerboard. Child-sized bookshelves were scattered about. The room also was filled with colorful blobs. In each one, a child was engulfed, looking half-devoured. It took me a second to realize they were reclining in some sort of moldable, form-fitting chairs. In the center was a librarian sitting on a wooden chair. She was holding a book in her lap and reading out loud. I stopped to listen.
“‘Oh my!’ said Amy Octopus. ‘Drowned LA is so beautiful!’” the librarian read. “Amy’s tentacles danced with happiness as she followed a shiny school of fish into the great, dark window in the skyscraper. The fish were like the sparkles on a Survival Day tree!”
“Story time,” Brian whispered.
We wandered to the back of the stacks. And there, sitting at a table near a window, I saw Rin. She was bathed in sunlight that made her hair and face glow as if she were in a Renaissance painting. She was bent over a book. Her lips were pursed and her forehead was creased in concentration.
“Well, look who’s here,” Brian said with surprise in his voice. “Hi, Rin.”
Rin looked up. “Hi Brian, Mavo.” She closed the book and put it on the table face down.
“What are you reading?” I asked.
“Oh, nothing,” she said. “What brings you here?”
“I thought Mavo would like it,” Brian said.
“It’s great,” I blurted. “We never had anything like it on the Outside.”
“But I heard you read a lot when you were young,” Rin said.
“Everybody had one or two favorite books that they held onto and shared,” I said. “I read every book we had a dozen times by the time I left.”
“Well,” Brian cut in. “I’ll say you got a great education.” He turned to Rin. “You heard Mavo’s speech.”
“A little,” she said. “But I had to step away for that thing we discussed.”
Brian nodded as if he understood. Which reminded me that I was an outsider.
“Did you like it?” I asked, then shut my mouth, aghast. I hadn’t intended to ask her about my speech. It seemed stupid and needy.
Rin gave me a quizzical look, as if she were asking herself why a hero of the revolution would need her encouragement. I felt my ears burn.
Desperately, I pointed to the book on the table. “I meant that,” I stammered, lying.
“The book?” Rin replied. “Yes, although it’s not like Immersion, of course.”
“No.” Out of curiosity, I had read books and then tried the Immersion versions. Some had been good, but they hadn’t been the same thing as reading. What I got was the way someone else had read it. I got to be in their head instead of in the story.
Did Rin feel that way, too?
“What is reading like for you?” I asked.
At that point, Brian gave a pained look. Rin and I looked at him. I guess books weren’t his passion. But then he tapped his com clip and said, “I just got a message from Trino. There’s a new feed from Anchorage. Might be important. I’ll see you both at dinner, maybe?”
“Sure,” I said, trying to conceal my enthusiasm for his departure. Rin hugged him. I looked away, pretending to be fascinated by the bookshelves.
I glanced back to see Brian strolling away. He even walked with confidence. With a jolt, I realized I had almost forgotten Rin was there until she touched me on the arm.
“What was that?” I asked. She’d said something and I had missed it. She’d also picked the book up and was holding it out to me.
“I said,” Rin repeated. She seemed a little annoyed. “I found this for you.”
“Oh,” I said. I took the book and looked at the title. “The Hobbit. Thank you. I’ve never read it.”
“I loved it,” she said. She leaned toward me. “Don’t tell anybody, but I read books when I was young.” She seemed to be slightly embarrassed, as if reading were some kind of vice or weird hobby. Which, I realized, was exactly how most people raised in an Immersion society felt.
“You didn’t Immerse?” I asked.
“Mom limited my Immersion time,” Rin said, giving me a complicit look. “She called it, ‘Reserving time for yourself.’”
“It must have made you feel lonely,” I said, recalling my own feelings.
“Yeah,” Rin said. She took a breath. “But Mom said, ‘You have to grow your own brain, a part of yourself that is entirely yourself.’ Not second-hand, you know?”
“Your Mom would love my Mom!” I exclaimed.
Rin made a face. “I hated her for it at the time. But later, I got it.”
“What?”
Rin frowned. “You have to reserve time for yourself, and the only way to become self-Realized is by not letting the Immersion control you. But,” she admitted. “it’s been a while since I sat down with a book.”
“But when I was coming here on the train, ” I said. “everybody seemed to want to Immerse.” I remembered the dinner where everybody had expected to overlay their food with Immersion enhancements.
“Some Realists think that Unity is dangerous but Immersion is OK,” Rin said. “And others think Immersion is the opiate of the people.” She gave a little laugh. “We don’t agree on everything.”
Or anything, I thought, but I didn’t say that out loud.
“What do you think?” I asked.
Rin gave me a mischievous smile. “I think it’s time for lunch,” she said. Then she licked her lips and I lost my train of thought.
On the way out of the library, I couldn’t help stopping at every shelf. A thick volume caught my eye and I pulled it out.
“Look!” I told Rin. “The entire Wuu cycle!”
“Is that good?” Rin stared at the heavy book doubtfully.
“Oh yeah, it’s supposed to be great. I’ve never seen a copy. It was samizdat. It came out during the decade when they banned books.”
“Oh, you mean the Cultural Hijacking thing,” Rin said. “They told us about that in reading class. Everybody being upset that someone from some group was writing about people from another group. Or something.”
“Yep,” I said. “They thought writers shouldn’t pretend to be other people. Of course, now you can know what people feel by downloading their Immersions. But back then, you had to research and study and guess. Some people thought it was a bad idea to do that, I guess, to try to understand and write about being someone you’re not.”
Rin gave me an arch look. “Some people still do,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say to that so we moved on, with the Wuu book under my arm. I was going to check it out. I stopped twice more to pull books off the shelves. Soon I was juggling a stack of them.
Rin gave me an amused look. “You sure they’ll let you take all of those?”
“I don’t know. Is there a limit?”
She laughed.
We came to a section with books I’d read. My arms were loaded down, so I pointed at one with my chin. “Try that one,” I said.
Rin took it, opened it at random to a page with a drawing. It was a rabbit wearing clothes. She puzzled out the words, her lips moving. Then she looked back at the front page.
“Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland?” she said. “Oh, like the Immersions. Isn’t there supposed to a funny queen who keeps shouting, ‘Off with her head!’ or is she the one that runs in place?”
“That’s the Red Queen,” I said. “She’s in a second book called, Through the Looking-Glass. She runs as fast as she can to stay in place. You’ve heard of the Red Queen Hypothesis?”
“No.”
“Well, it just means a species has to keep constantly evolving to survive against other species, who are also constantly evolving. An evolutionary arms race. It comes from that character.”
Rin gave me a rueful look.
“Why in the world would you know that?” she asked playfully. “What don’t you know?”
“Way too much.” I said.
On the other hand, I thought, despite the fact that most people had literally billions of things to watch, listen to and feel, most of them seemed depressingly ignorant.
I kept that thought to myself, too.
We walked back to the hotel. It wasn’t even noon, but it was already hot enough that waves of heat rippled off the sidewalk. Rin didn’t seem to be affected. I wished I had one of the Circo Eterno snow cones. I could faintly hear the music from the circus grounds wafting through the clear desert air.
THE HOTEL FELT COOL as a crypt, which made me flash uncomfortably on that horrifying moment in the Columbarium when I’d found Pallburg’s body. I shivered, and not from the air conditioning.
I got a surprise as we walked through the huge lobby full of cult statues and banners. It was packed with people gawking and talking to themselves, obviously taking guided Immersion tours. When I’d first arrived, the place had been nearly empty.
“Tourists?” I asked Rin in confusion.
“Sure,” she said. “The whole city runs on tourism. Why not this place?”
Someone detached himself from a wall and approached with a purposeful walk. I recognized Leon. Had he been waiting for us?
“Hi, Leon,” Rin said. “We’re just back from the library.”
“So I see,” he said, nodding at the pile of books in my arms.
“We’re just going to eat,” Rin added smoothly. “And I wondered if you wouldn’t mind doing me a favor and putting these up in Mavo’s room?” She turned to me. “That’s OK, isn’t it, Mavo?”
“Sure.” I already knew I didn’t have much privacy in this place.
Leon’s expression didn’t change but I sensed something like hidden energy or eagerness as he stepped forward to take the books.
Maybe, I thought, he wants the chance to search my room. Well, he was welcome to do it. Everything I owned was in my backpack, and there wasn’t anything special in there except my sister’s doll.
The real scary stuff was in my head, and he couldn’t search that. I hoped.
Rin thanked Leon. He nodded, took the books and turned on his heel. I watched him go, the stack of books riding easily in the crook of one arm. As before, he moved effortlessly, with sharklike grace.
Rin watched him go with a look on her face I couldn’t decipher. Then she turned to me.
“Come on,” she said.
We wove through the crowds to one end of the great room. A set of elegant, frosted glass doors that I hadn’t noticed before led into the fanciest restaurant I’d ever seen. It was immense, full of people chatting at booths and tables covered in real linen, with china and crystal everywhere. The walls were a subdued gold. There wasn’t a screen or Immersion node in sight. Rin waved a hand at the richly suited host, who nodded and pressed a button. A moment later, a holo in an old-fashioned tuxedo appeared, and we followed its floating form to an empty table. The table looked out on an enclosed garden full of what I guessed were fruit trees, and maybe, flamingoes? I couldn’t tell if any of it was real, although if not, it was odd that a holo landscape would show someone wearing waders, scooping muck out of a small pond.
Rin tapped up the menu. I took one look at the prices and my stomach fell.
“Rin,” I whispered. “I don’t know if I can afford this.”
“Don’t worry,” she said with a quirky smile. “We’re covered.”
I leaned forward and said, “Do Realists come here?” I thought it was pretty pricey for an underground rebel group.
“We’re part owners,” she said. “This is the Free Zone. We can practice free enterprise, so we tapped the tourist vein. We got seed money from anonymous supporters.” She made a face. “We even own a piece of the Circo. We have our own balloon.”
Real waiters came around. I had no idea what to do or what to order. Rin asked for specials and a Third in a gold-laced vest that matched the walls recited a string of things that probably sounded delicious, if I’d known what they were. In the end, I followed Rin’s advice and ordered some kind of fish. It came on a tray covered in dry ice mist, with waves of vegetable foam and a sauce that smelled better than anything I’d ever smelled, even in Immersion. It tasted odd but delicious, and I had to stop myself from wolfing it down.
Rin ordered a hamburger.
“Don’t worry, it’s vat, not cow factory,” she said. I nodded as if I knew what she meant.
The whole thing was so intimidating that I barely spoke to Rin during the meal. Besides, I was busy with my food. That and the atmosphere were overloading my senses. It was so overpowering that I kept waiting for my head to explode in pain, the way it did if I was Immersed for too long.
Dessert was something called “apple tart à la mode” that turned out to be an individual pie with two separate crust rings, one inside the other. The inner one had the pie filling and the outer one contained a moat of ice cream. I had never eaten so much at one time, and I was a little ashamed. The meal probably could have fed half a dozen Outsiders.
Rin noticed my expression and said, “Don’t worry. None of it goes to waste, and tourists expect this sort of thing. It’s why they come here.”
“Do they know Realists own this?”
“That would be bad for business,” she said with a puckish grin.
As we left the restaurant, I suddenly felt exhausted. I thought it must be a combination of the heavy food, my lack of sleep since arriving and also coming down from the highs of my speech and— I had to be honest— being with Rin.
“Thanks,” I told her. “That was unbelievable.”
“I knew you’d like it,” Rin said. She looked at me and seemed to read my mind. “Well, I have some stuff to do. What about you?”
I suppressed a yawn. “I think I’ll go back to my room and read some of those books. I can’t decide which I want to look at first.”
Rin grinned. “See you at dinner with Brian?”
“Will it be at this place?” I gestured.
“No, sorry, and don’t get too used it. It’s not something we do all the time.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” I said. “Although that dessert...” I licked my lips and patted my stomach.
Rin laughed. Once again, I realized how much I liked that laugh.
I went back to my room. My backpack looked undisturbed. If Leon had searched it, he’d done a neat job. The books were stacked on the table. I picked up the Wuu cycle but decided it was too heavy— in every sense— to start right now. If I were honest, I really didn’t feel like reading. So much had happened to me in such a short time that I needed time to digest it (along with the food). In a matter of days, I’d gone from the most hated person in the world to being with people who, well, idolized me. I wasn’t quite ready to admit that I was starting to enjoy myself. But, I thought, maybe the Realists weren’t as bad as they’d been made out to be.
