The Heart Goes Last

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“You won’t be going to your job today,” she says in a neutral voice. “You’ll be coming with me, in the car.”

The room darkens. “Why?” he says. “What’s up?”

“I suggest you eat that other egg,” she says, smiling. “You’ll need the energy. You’re going to have a long day.”

“Why is that?” he says as calmly as he can. He peers down over the edge of the next half-hour. Mist, a sheer drop. He feels sick.

She’s poured herself a coffee, she’s leaning in across the table. “The cameras are off, but not for long,” she says. “So I’m going to tell you this very quickly.” Her manner has changed completely. Gone is the awkward flirtation, the dominatrix pose. She’s urgent, straightforward. “Forget everything you think you know about me; and by the way, you kept your cool very well during our time together. I know I’m not your favourite squeeze toy, but you would have fooled most. Which is why I’m asking you to do this: because I think you can. We need to smuggle somebody to the outside – outside the Consilience wall. I’ve already switched your database entries. You’ve been Phil these past months, but now you’re going to be Stan again, just for a few hours. Then after that we can get you out.”

Stan feels dizzy. “Out?” he says. “How?” Nobody gets out unless they’re top management.

“Never mind how. Think of yourself as a messenger. I need you to take some information out.”

“Just a minute,” says Stan. “What’s going on?”

“Ed’s right about some things,” says Jocelyn. “You heard him on the Town Meeting. There really are some folks who want to expose the Project. But they aren’t all out there. Some of them are in here. In fact, some of them are in this room.” She smiles: now her smile has an almost elfish quality. Dangerous though this conversation must be, she’s enjoying it.

“Whoa, just a minute,” says Stan. This is too much in one sound bite. “How come? I thought you were part of the top management in this place. You’re high up in Surveillance, right?”

“I am. As a matter of fact, I’m Ed’s founding partner. I supported the Project in the early stages. I believed in it; I believed in Ed. I worked hard on it. I thought it was for the best,” says Jocelyn. “I bought the good-news story. And it was true at first, considering the alternative, which was a terrible life for a lot of people. But then Ed brought in a different group of investors, and they all got greedy.”

“Greedy about what?” says Stan. “It’s not like this place makes a profit! On the fucking Brussels sprouts? And the chickens? … I thought it was more about saving money, or like a charity thing, right?”

Jocelyn sighs. “You don’t honestly believe this whole operation is being run simply to rejuvenate the rust belt and create jobs? That was the original idea, but once you’ve got a controlled population with a wall around it and no oversight, you can do anything you want. You start to see the possibilities. And some of those got very profitable, very fast.”

Stan can hardly follow. “I guess the building contractors must be making …”

“Forget the contracting end,” says Jocelyn. “It’s a sideshow. The main deal is the prison. Prisons used to be about punishment, and then reform and penitence, and then keeping dangerous offenders inside. Then, for quite a few decades, they were about crowd control – penning up the young aggressive guys to keep them off the streets. And then, when they started to be run as private businesses, they were about the profit margins for the prepackaged jail-meal suppliers, and the hired guards and so forth.” Stan nods; he understands all of this.

“But when we signed on,” he says. “It wasn’t like that. They didn’t lie about what we’d have, inside. We got the house, we got … Before, we were broke, we were miserable. In here we were a lot happier.”

“Of course you were,” says Jocelyn. “At first. So was I, at the beginning. But this isn’t the beginning any more.”

“What’s the bad news, then?” says Stan.

“Suppose I told you about the income from body parts? Organs, bones, DNA, whatever’s in demand. That’s one of the big earners for this place. It was going on in other countries first, and they were making a killing; that aspect was too tempting for Ed. There’s a big market for transplant material among aging millionaires, no? Ed’s bought into a retirement-home chain, and he’s set up the transplant clinics right inside each facility. Ruby Slippers Retirement Homes and Clinics: it’s big. The main operation is in Las Vegas: he figures there’ll be less scrutiny there, because anything goes. He doesn’t miss a trick.”

“Just a minute,” says Stan. “Whose body parts? It’s still the same number of guys in Positron, I know them, they’re not being cut up for organs, it’s not as if anyone’s vanishing . Not once we got rid of the real criminals.”

“Yes, Ed thinks it’s a shame we ran out of those,” says Jocelyn. “He’s got plans to import some more, take them off the hands of the public, so to speak. But your guys are the good citizens of Consilience, they keep the place running day to day, they’re the worker ants. The raw material ‘s being shipped in from outside.”

The truck. The hooded, shuffling prisoners. Oh, great, thinks Stan. We’re stuck in a grainy black-and-white retro-thriller movie. “You mean they’re rounding people up, carting them here? Killing them for parts?”

“Just undesirables,” says Jocelyn, smiling with her big teeth. She’s kept some of her badass sarcasm, anyway. “But now undesirable is whoever Ed says. Ed says the next hot thing is going to be babies’ blood, by the way. It’s being talked up as very rejuvenating for the elderly, and the margin on that is going to be astronomical.”

“That’s …” Stan wants to say “fucking gruesome,” which doesn’t begin to cover it. Or else he could say, “You’re shitting me.” But he remembers that thing he heard about the mouse experiments; also she seems deadly serious. “Where are they planning on getting the babies?”

“There’s no shortage,” she says with that other smile of hers, the ironic one. “People leave them lying around. So careless.”

“Has anyone heard about this?” he says. “Out there? Have they put it together, shouldn’t they …”

“That’s what Ed’s worried about,” says Jocelyn. “That’s why the ultra-tight security. A few rumours were circulating, but he’s managed to shut them down. Now nobody connected with a news outlet can get within a mile of this place, and as you know, no information is allowed out. That’s why we have to send a person, such as you. You’ll be taking a digitized document dump and some videos, on a flash drive. We’ll try to set you up with a key media target. Someone who’s not pals with Ed’s political friends, and who’s willing to take a chance on breaking the story.”

“So I’m supposed to be what?” says Stan. “The errand boy?” The one who gets shot, he thinks.

“More or less,” says Jocelyn.

“Why don’t you take it out yourself? This document dump.”

Jocelyn looks at him pityingly. “No way,” she says. “It’s true I have a pass, I can go out. I’ve been setting up the outside operations, paying off the people we hire to do the less legal things Ed’s got us involved in. But I’m monitored the whole time. To make sure I stay safe is Ed’s excuse. He trusts me as far as he trusts anyone, but increasingly that’s not much. He’s getting jumpy.”

“Why didn’t you make a break for it? Just get out?” says Stan. It’s most likely what he would have done.

“I helped create this,” says Jocelyn. “I need to help fix it. Now, time’s up. We have to move.”

Sandbag

They’re in the car now; he can scarcely remember walking out to it. In front of them there’s a driver – a real one, not a robot. The driver sits upright, his grey shoulders straight, the back of his head noncommittal. The streets glide past.

“Where are we going?” says Stan.

“Positron,” says Jocelyn. “Our exit strategy for you begins there. Need to get you prepped, then see you through the day. This move is not without risks. It would be very unfortunate if you got caught.”

The driver, thinks Stan. It’s always the driver, in movies. Listening in. Spying on everyone. “What about him?” he says. “He’s heard all this.”

“Oh, that’s only Phil,” says Jocelyn. “Or Max. You’ll recognize him from the videos.”

Phil turns around, gives a brief smile. It’s him, all right – Charmaine’s Max, with his handsome, narrow, untrustworthy face, his too bright eyes.

“He’s been such a help in creating motive,” says Jocelyn. “We chose Charmaine because we thought she might be …”

“Susceptible,” says Phil.

“Sufficient to have stood but free to fall,” says Jocelyn.

“What?” says Stan. This is some slur on Charmaine. He clenches his fists. Steady, he tells himself.

“It was a gamble,” says Jocelyn.

“But she paid off,” says Phil.

The lying bastard, he wasn’t even sincere, thinks Stan. He was shitting poor Charmaine all along. Setting her up. Leading her astray for motives different from the ones you’re supposed to have when you lead someone astray. It’s as if Charmaine wasn’t good enough for him; not good enough for a genuine illicit passion. Which, if you think about it, is actually a criticism of Stan. His hands are burning: he’d like to strangle the guy. Or at least give him a solid punch in the teeth.