#brownsuits

-

He is a ceaseless optimist and will love California for the rest of his life.  He thinks his short time in Russia made too much of an impression.  

Even traveling through the Palomar mountains, he can feel the phantom dig of the face guard he wore on outdoor patrol of the Matterhorn chemical factories.  He feels suspiciously light here on the bus, out of fatigues, out of weighted packs, his head unwired of earpieces and communication links.  There are still voices in his ears, but they come from his traveling companions, who surround him.  For all the whispers he heard about non-citizens, there are an awful lot of white faces.  But he recognizes a few conversations as Russian, and someone is talking to themselves in Ukrainian.  He can't understand more than a few words.  He never had time to become fluent.

The nervous, overpowering scent of uncertain men is a scent he's still not entirely used to.  He's the youngest one on the bus possibly, and maybe still a bit of a sissy.  If he closes his eyes and muffles his ears, he can pull up his mother's voice.  She speaks in Urdu.  Twenty-one years ago, she named him Yasir.

The first thing they all lose are their fingerprints.  Some of them will lose their names entirely, but he manages to keep Yasir.  More than a ceaseless optimistic - maybe he's not such a sissy either.

-

He knows of the Walter legacy.  He knows of Blue Matter and the Amazing Singing Warbots.  Not so much warbots these days, but he's sensitive to the potential of Western military propaganda.  A deactivated weapon doesn't remain deactivated for long.  If it's allowed to continue existing, it exists under the assumption it will be updated and improved.

He becomes aware of the Cavalcadium - its formal offices, its meeting halls, the corridors of tableaux and functional history.  He's seen so-called eternal flames at gravesides, but nothing will ever compare to the insistence of this logo, the ever-turning blue gear burning and burning until everything in his vision becomes white.  

And providing enough time, even blue becomes white.  In the absence of the light, everything is spotty and unreal. Solid walls are less tangible.  The floor underneath his feet loses substance.  The suit is just uncomfortable.

He doesn't see the daylight for some time.  He's being updated and improved.

-

The training is the worst part, because as soon as it's over, he no longer remembers what it was.  Remembering, in San Diego, means something different than remembering in Norilsk, than remembering in Lahore.  He recalls words and phrases, sharp and clear on their own, but surrounded by the fuzz of his own failed brain functioning.  The words are stop stay hold turn lie remain down.

They aren't his orders, but orders he might give other people, people who might otherwise not want to stop or remain down.

He doesn't ask what would happen, if they simply refuse to listen.  The answer is already carved into his brain:  They do listen, and they always listen.

At this point, if anyone would ask him where he had been born, he would answer Pakistan.  If they asked what city, he would not say Lahore.  He wouldn't say anything.

-

When the worst is over and done with, he finds the duties of a brownsuit aren't much different from duties in the army, or duties as an armed guard at a Matterhorn chemical plant in Norilsk - mostly, it's just standing around and waiting for something to happen.  This is a relief.

He's lucid, and has time to observe.  He finds out none of the Russians from the bus accompanied him from Norilsk.  They were recruited from Kalingrad.  They're lucid too, and they remember Kalingrad.  He's younger, so they treat him with affectionate derision, which he accepts because it feels so normal.

"Well," they ask, "haven't you skipped from one pile of shit to the next?"

-

To shoot an MG3, he has to understand how it works.  This kind of sense doesn't apply to Blue Matter.

"So it will be very easy to be blown up," he says one day.  "They must not mind the turnover rate."

"Looking in from the outside, there is no turnover rate."  The man speaking is a Canadian, and much older, older than the two Russians.  "There hasn't been a blow up since the fifties."

"I saw that explosion."  On YouTube, various times throughout his childhood.  The automaton core explosion, captured forever by Becilian camera, enjoyed a pseudo-illegal online notoriety, a notch above the tamer pornography and slightly below snuff films.  It is a snuff film, in essence, but the worst of the damage is obscured by light.

The man stares him down. "They have internet where you're from?"

There are several implications, but mostly it's meant to shut him up.  He smiles, and shuts up.

"The problem with ones like you," the man continues, "Is you all still think you say things that matter.  And that's why you won't last."

-

Yasir lasts.  The man does not.  A few weeks after their conversation, he diverts from the Cavalcadium in an ill-timed merge of double agents, bought out by none other than Matterhorn, his old stay in Norilsk.

It's a messy operation overall.  Yasir knows, only because he turned down their offer first.

He survives his first turnover.  Truthfully it's not a question of survival, but of existence and nonexistence.  He's not consciously aware of the distinction yet.

He is Yasir.  Lahore means nothing to him.

-

There are disappearances in ranks.  He loses track of the two Russians.

His imagination is sharp.  So he imagines a thumb print blotting out caches in his brain.  It blots out his capacity for suspicion.  His lucidity prevails, but then again, maybe he's only fooling himself; real people have birthdays, telephone numbers, driver's licenses, passports, phones, bills, friends - he feels the weight of these accruements by association, whenever he passes a genius in the halls.

The thumb hasn't blotted out his capacity for resentment, but he's not a resentful person by nature.

Worse, if the only thing holding him back now is himself.  Worse:  What if this is something he wants?

-

The woman lasts for a long time.

Yasir has participated in many retrievals, and has been recognized as talented.  This distances him from the muddle of backbiting, but also means he has to function at full capacity, while still being one nodule of a large brain.  The dissonance is painful, and this one lasts for too long.  By time he tracks her down, following the trail of her consciousness, he's losing his own.  Lucidity is losing appeal.

She's already given up.  She is as tall as he is, unruffled and expectant in the uniform officer colors of blue and white.  She isn't a genius, which explains why she lasted so long - she set the bar lower.  Instead of a straight sample of Blue Matter, she holds illegal access to patent files, which would have led her to access to blueprints of the Walter-grade S.O.U.L. artifice.  

It's a password, nestled gently somewhere in her brain.  Geniuses are bombastic.  Cavalcadium geniuses are bombastic to the point of insanity, to the point that all you have to do is follow the rubble.  

He finds the idea of the Cavalcadium being hindered by the digital age hysterical.  Maybe she does too.  There's no time.

"So tell me," she says, "Which one do you work for?"

She doesn't cower.  She's lucid and tired of it, like he is.  When he doesn't answer her, she sits on the floor and kicks off her shoes, as if she anticipates a long wait.

"Which one do you work for?"  She repeats.  "What's your name?  Or is it gone?"

"I'm here to detain you," he answers.  There's a small amount of protocol in dealing with superior officers.  It's all he can give her.

"You've done it," she says, carelessly.  "What's your name?"

Is she going to try to offer him something?  Underneath that possibility he thinks if he gives her his name, he'll lose it for good.  It's just a word, but so are stay, stop, remain down - through him, they're imbued with meaning.

"I'm here to detain you," he says.

"You've done it," she repeats, annoyed.  The annoyance hides a tiny slick of desperation, of anxiety - not that she thinks she can get away, but that she knows her exaggerated acquiescence is meant to ward off the necessity of harsher measures.

"Are you for the Beciles?" She ventures on her own.  "Because one of you has just tried to defect from Becile agency.  That's why I'm detained by you, right now - if someone doesn't get to him first, I doubt he'll survive long."

She's right, but it's not his concern.  The hallway they occupy is empty and quiet.  He ventures a little closer, but not physically.  She's sharp - she feels it.

"I am detained," she insists.

"You aren't," he says.  "Not yet."

-

He knows there's no such thing as total acquiescence when it concerns a brain.  Similarly, there's no such thing as a strong brain or a weak one.  They can and will resist, more or less, the same amount of time.

Sometimes he thinks about the genius that dreamed up this method, and derives a small amount of satisfaction that their brain is no different.

-

When he has what he needs from her, she let's something slip through.  He never takes more than what is necessary.  This is the only time someone has willingly given him something, and the only time he takes something more.  

It's only words.  They tell him: "Soon you'll be as afraid as I am."  They're as full of hope and hatred as anyone with a decent lifespan can muster.  Really, it's the least he can do.

-

There is a lot of input and output in a year - liquidations, hearings, lawsuits, swearings, presentations, conventions, honors, meetings, inspections, tours - both official and unofficial.  It all flows through him, in a sense.  He's become a functioning part of this ecosystem.  He functions.

In a year, he doesn't defect once.  He understands why some do, though; it's an expression of autonomous self.  And unless you are very good, it's an eventual suicide.

He is very good.  But he's also afraid.  His mother's face is like a blot in an Impressionist painting (he remembers Impressionists - there's plenty of reason to these mental blot-outs, but it leaves for some surreal images).

"I can't even begin to understand," he says aloud to himself.  He speaks in Urdu, to nothing. 

-

The lifespan of a brownsuit is limited, like all living things.  If you are very good, you jump rank and continue becoming more - until there's nothing left to become, and the cycle ends.  

It's all very natural, he supposes. 

-

When he does remove himself, the training remains.  He ditches the suit.  It's symbolic, sort of - mostly, it was itchy.

-

He's not a citizen.  His name is Yasir.  He's twenty-two and sad to leave California, because he loves California.  It's part of his character to believe there's so much in the world to love, otherwise he never would have left Lahore.  He doesn't know he left Lahore.

Too bad he never got to see the robots that started all of this, he thinks.  He thinks in Urdu, to himself.  Too bad he never even got to handle Blue Matter.  Or Green.

She wouldn't understand how the girl managed to convince the old man to keep their team down to three. She could guess, very well, but she refused to understand; till the day she died, she would refuse.

Even with three, there were too many extensions of trust.  She didn't trust Yasir.  She doubted Yasir trusted her.  But she trusted Jesse in a condescending, but sincere way, and Yasir trusted Jesse with an unreal slavishness that repelled her.  Not that she saw - Jesse wasn't in the morgue as often as she was - but she knew.

As such, Camerlang and Yasir were obliged to trust each other in the interim.  It was a weak juncture, and evidence of their messy planning.  But there'd been no time for anything else.

Camerlang was in the front seat of the little silver thing she'd rented (her own expense, not on Biocore's).  Yasir drove.  Jesse was in the backseat, stretched out with her back to them, the camera bag held to her chest like a teddy bear.   Camerlang had grown up in cities, and any dark, gaping expanse of nature gave her the creeps.  The empty freeway they zipped through, the furred mountain ranges and the sky (black, black, black), and the cold stars - she resented it.  It was a cold, empty snow globe they occupied, and she hated the interior, right down to the insides of the little silver car and the stupid family image they parodied.  She was forty-five.  One of her great natural gifts was that her hatred didn't feed off her looks or her health.  Hate was with her as honestly as her liver, and processed its chemicals through her brain as if it were nothing more than a pituitary gland.

She turned away from the window and took cigarettes from Jesse's bag, lit one of them.  She switched on the pertinent vent in the dash before Yasir could, and it sucked up her exhalations; supposedly, it would barf them back out into the stiff night air, just like Jesse had barfed on the Cavalcadium lawn.  They should choke on it, she thought, smoking and staring out the black stamp of the windshield.  Puke and smoke.  It wasn't enough. Not for her, and not for Jesse, who was only twenty-one but too smart to ignore the boiling of her own resentments.

Yasir steered with one hand and messed quietly with the radio with the other.  She'd seen her fair share of bodyguards and had numerous, colorful experiences with certain members of Biocore's security division.  Experience dictated that the ones who didn't look like brutes had other, insidious, fatal talents.  Yasir's hands were finely shaped, dark skinned and soft on the tops, calloused underneath.  Not brute hands.  Not brute faced, not even in the dark.

His hands were shaped like hers, she thought, though it didn't make much of an impression on her mind.  To an extent, they were also like Jesse's.  Finely shaped, ha ha - so are hagedorn needles and enterotomes.  Was there a time when she could have been tricked by something for being beautiful?  She turned to the black window and saw a slice of her own reflection, a razor-thin crescent superimposed over the sky and the anxious stars, and she thought, no, never.

"Those are the Palomar Mountains," Yasir volunteered, in an easy way that implied she could take it or leave it.

"Is that so."

"There's walking trails.  An observatory."

"To observe what?"

"The sky," he said, blandly.  "Or you could find a shiny surface on the telescope and stare at your face some more."

"I'm proud of my face.  You're what, twenty-five?  Twenty-six?  How many situations do you think I've gone through where my face could have suffered?"  She opened the window a fraction, and let the air suck the cigarette butt from her fingertips.  "My face is more relevant than a constellation.  They named one after an air pump once.  Why should I give a shit?"

"An air pump?"  He was smiling faintly, even when she didn't answer.  In the backseat, Jesse's knees cracked as she stretched them.  Camerlang hoped she was asleep, though the hope was patronizing.  They would have to do a checkup tonight.

"Yasir."  She didn't wait to be acknowledged.  "We went over the medical check-ins.  Do you remember everything?"

"Yes."

"The blood pressure cuff?"  She listed, voice sharp, doubting him out of pride. "And taking blood?  If something happens to me, you can't get all nice about it - once a week.  Each week needs accounted for."

"I know."

"The hypodermics?"

"I know."  She saw him look at Jesse's dim reflection in the rearview mirror, as if suddenly guilty.  "I've given shots before."

"Of what?  Strychnine?"

"No."  He settled back in his seat, resting both hands on the steering wheel.  His face was exhausted, but it did not reach out to her.  "Pavulon."

Their hands and Pavulon - those were all the similarities she cared to find out between them.  Yasir picked up on this somehow and continued his explorations of the radio.  The little car was a good car - the sounds of their accelerations were muted, stamped down in their tiny, dark interior.

She realized this would be the safest she would ever feel, for a long time.  Everything would start on Monday.  All she had now was thirty more minutes playing mommy in a shotgun seat.  Her hands flexed and twisted in her lap, her skin hot with rage.

Yasir, in his explorations of the FM dial, found a holiday station.

"Turn that off," she demanded.

"It's Christmas," he said lightly, as if he knew her order stemmed from some deep-set aberration and was eager to avoid offending her.

But he turned off the radio, which was his only choice.

After several minutes of silence and scenery, Yasir asked: "Are you convinced something is going to happen to you?"

"You would like that, wouldn't you?"  She said, bored, not yet threatened.

"It would be inconvenient," he admitted.  "The sight of blood makes me queasy."

"You're crazy."

"I'm kidding."  He was smiling again, faintly.  "I still don't want to see yours."

"How nice."  Pinpricks of light were blotting between the mountains now, house lights.  "Brownsuits leave blood behind?"

"It depends.  If a group of five brownsuit individuals are all working for the same purpose, there won't be any blood.  In my experience?  You have a group of five brownsuits - one will be working for the purposes of Matterhorn and Son.  One will be a double-agent for Triangle Electric - one, you think is working for the straight ideal of seizing the threatened Blue Matter in question, but in reality he's defected twice from Walter Robotics and is expecting execution by the next brownsuit owned by Becile Tech.  By the end of the night you have a dead, vanished client and at least two dead brownsuits.  But Blue Matter..."

There was an ironic lift in his voice, which he quickly stamped down. 

"The Blue Matter is safe."