Dominion

EIGHT

After Sully disappeared, Ruppert took great pains to keep his life unremarkable. He joined another group at church, the Dune Buggers for Christ, which involved building machines from kits and driving them around a church-owned park in the desert (but only as a large and supervised group, of course). He liked it because it meant hours of time at the church workshop, working with his hands-it was more enjoyable and more honest than the Revelation study group, focusing on electrical and mechanical systems, on undeniable reality instead of ideology.

He did not miss a single Revelation class, though, and he spent more time at the church golf course and working out in the church gym. He expressed maximum groupiness at every turn, smiling and slapping hands with anyone he vaguely recognized.

He lay awake many nights waiting for someone to kick in his front door, or at least come to question him, but as far as he could tell, his mistaken visit to Sully’s house brought no consequences. It was always possible they were monitoring him closely. He would never know the difference until it was too late.

Sometimes he looked at the sleeping form of his wife and wondered how he had come to this place, sleeping next to this person who existed in a different universe from his own, a universe that could be reordered from top to bottom at the proper signal. He’d been fifteen when Columbus happened, and much of his life since then felt like a dazed sleepwalk. His private questions, too dangerous to be asked, targeted the larger truths about the world, about why his country seemed bent on ruling the planet, how they got away with claiming morality while they rained death on millions around the world, how they managed to claim his county was free and democratic when ten or fifteen or twenty million people were incarcerated, depending on what numbers you saw, and there was only one ideology represented on the ballot.

He puzzled over the mass behavior of humanity, but drifted like a zombie through his own life. He’d wanted to work as a print journalist, the kind who took long research trips and studied problems in the most troubled parts of the world. By the time he graduated college, those jobs had become not only scarce, but dangerous-writers kept disappearing without explanation, as had much of the faculty at Berkeley. Newsgathering in foreign countries was limited to military and intelligence personnel for national security reasons.

He’d wisely joined the Dominionist church, a denomination that had spread quickly through the nation after Columbus and become more or less a requirement for those who wanted to participate in public life. Contacts at the church had gotten him his first internship with GlobeNet, and he’d worked there ever since.

He met Madeline as a “suggested match” from the church’s Unmarried Young Adult ministry. Membership in that group was automatic for anyone who fit the description. The counselors would set you up on dates whether you asked them to or not. Madeline had been the fifth woman Ruppert met in this way, but they’d all been very similar, from well-heeled conservative families, all of them employed in some branch of the sort of social-service work the church deemed proper for females.

He dated Madeline for seven months, and as she pressed him harder and harder for marriage, he had trouble finding any cause to object. Madeline was undeniably beautiful, but she was also far more socially poised than Ruppert, navigating the new strangeness of life like a born native. She was about the same kind of person he would have to eventually marry anyway. The entire culture around him insisted he marry as soon as possible.

Madeline had finally gotten her way when she came to his home one night by herself, without one of the matronly chaperones that usually observed their courtship. This was shocking behavior on its own, but then Madeline had tied his hands to a chair and slowly removed her clothes until she stood naked in front of him. It was not illegal, so long as he wasn’t paying her money to do it, but it was all completely forbidden.

The extreme audacity of the act impressed him even more than the sight of her body. For an unmarried woman to be alone with a man was shameful, but to reveal herself in this way could have gotten her flogged, if she belonged one of the more severe women’s groups, or excommunicated from the church altogether. He admired her for it, and he agreed to marry her.

She had never done anything so bold again. Over drinks on the golf course, Ruppert occasionally heard similar stories from other men, and it eventually occurred to him that this was a technique women taught to each other, perhaps even in their church groups. The women never broke the law by performing actual sex acts, but in a culture where exposed wrists and ankles were points of contention for women, the sight of a woman without her clothes amounted to sensory overload for most men.

It was gradually dawning on Ruppert just how completely forces outside himself had shaped his life. There was no area in his life that was not carefully controlled by church and state.

He felt the strain especially hard at work, where he continued to read the official version of reality to a massive unseen audience. After the strong public-relations effort to boost support for an invasion of Egypt, stories about the radical cleric Muhammad al Taba dwindled away in favor of more palatable news-celebrity gossip, tales of captured spies and terrorist attacks narrowly averted, along with a heavy serving of petty local crime stories artificially inflated into national scandal.

After a couple of months, the temptation to return to his illegal computer with its ability to bypass federal filters became too strong to resist. He drove to the storage facility in Watts, though after the Sully episode he half-expected to find his unit emptied out. Instead, he found it just as he’d left it.

He closed the rattling garage door, then felt relief wash over him as he slipped on the goggles and gloves and booted up the little black cube of a computer. Then he was online, floating among thousands more holographic cubes and spheres than his home and office systems permitted him to see. Each icon was a door to a different realm of information.

He explored down a few of the African channels and connected to the Carthaginian, a news archive in Tunisia. You had to be careful with foreign news services, because any source could be loaded with propaganda. Ruppert tried to stay to the smaller, independent journalists. Generally, the slicker the production values, the less you could trust.

He searched the archive and drew up a chain of texts, images and videolinks focused on al Taba. He picked one of the texts-written words were the most informative, but the easiest to fake-and it swelled to the size of a poster board. The text scrolled automatically as he read.

LUXOR, Egypt-American mercenaries clashed with the cult of Sheik Muhammad al Taba in their home base, the ancient temple at Karnak. In a standoff that continues tonight, the warrior cleric and as many as sixty followers have kept the Atlantic forces at bay with machine gun fire and napalm grenades.

Sources indicate that the mercenaries were sent by Hartwell Services, the private army owned by the American Vice President’s family. According to locals, al Taba may have placed a bomb at a Hartwell installation further down the Nile.

The dateline for the story was two weeks old. Ruppert reordered his search results by date, then selected the most recent item. It was four days old.

After three days of fighting, Atlantic forces captured Sheik al Taba and seventeen of his disciples. As many as two dozen Taba followers are believed dead. Two American casualties were reported.

Hartwell Senior Infantry Coordinator Kurt Brownback, who led the attack, described the fight as a “great victory for the people of Egypt in their quest for democracy.”

Al Taba is the leader of a radical group of heretics who mix Islam with practices of the primitive Egyptians. Local imams denounce his cult as satanic. Al Taba clashed with Egyptian authorities several times to gain control of Karnak, which he calls the “Grand Mosque” of his cult.

The fate of the children who lived in the temple compound is not known. The damage to the 3600-year old temple has not been assessed but is believed extensive.

Ruppert sat back and thought it over. According to the news he’d read to the greater Southern California region, al-Taba was a “terrorist general” commanding an army of (at latest estimate) nearly a million men, with divisions all across Africa. Capturing al Taba had been the entire objective of the invasion of Egypt, according to Ruppert. If it had happened four days ago, it should be all over the nets, even cause for a special parade.

The Atlantic forces had toppled the radical Egyptian regime along the way, naturally, as penalty for harboring al Taba. Ruppert had mentioned this at the tag end of one of his reports about the invasion of Egypt, as if it were a minor and entirely predictable detail, and then it was on to the entertainment news.

The rest of the news had centered on al Taba, the pressing and urgent need to grab al Taba before he seized control of all North Africa. The fact that Hartwell Services had actually seized control of all Egypt did not rate an explicit mention. It was much easier to focus a television audience on capturing a single archvillain, using any means necessary, than to convince them that an invasion of an entire country was necessary. Coverage of the full-scale war could be omitted if you focused the audience on the good-and-evil struggle to capture the one supremely evil individual. At GlobeNet, they sometimes referred to these individuals as the "Devil of the Day."

A metallic squeal drilled into his ears. Ruppert tried to cover his ears with his hands, but the painful noise screamed from the inside of his earphones, not the exterior world.

The digital environment froze around him. He touched the shimmering icons on the control panel floating in the air beside his head, but none of the programs responded.

The environment shattered into a million fragments and Ruppert lost his balance, then fell backwards. He tumbled into an open, dark space. Bright silver skulls snapped at him from the dark, their shining teeth clacking together. The seal of the Department of Terror rose like a monolith before him, ten stories high, then a hundred. The animated, three-dimensional seal depicted a silver bald eagle soaring against a moonlit night sky, breathing fire, shooting lightning from its talons. The eagle’s hooked beak opened, and another painful metallic squeal sounded in Ruppert’s ears.

A cold male voice boomed out at Ruppert: “You are in violation of Department of Terror Code 207-B. Importation of enemy propaganda and unauthorized data. You are under arrest. Now submitting your case to an automated tribunal. The tribunal has ruled you guilty of terrorist activity. Sentencing will be adjudicated by a Department of Terror official.”

Ruppert reached out to bang on his control panel again, but it had disappeared. He tore the video goggles from his head, then peeled the input gloves from his hands.

Every indicator light on the surface of his little computer glowed bright red. He jabbed the power button with his thumb, but Terror had seized the computer and he had lost control.

Ruppert hurled the computer against the concrete wall of the storage cell. It fell and crashed to the floor, but all the little lights still burned. He threw it twice more, than a third time, finally opening a short hairline crack along one edge, but the device was tough and he had no real means of destroying it.

Ruppert lifted the latch on the cell’s garage door, then took a deep breath. Terror men, or whatever police or Guardsmen happened to be available, would likely be waiting outside with their guns high. If he moved too quickly, they would cut him down instinctively.

He eased the door up, hearing every individual clank as each panel slid into the overhead track. He looked out to where he’d parked his car.

No one was here. His car had not even been disturbed. He listened carefully to the night around him-there was music and gunfire in the distance, but nothing happening in the storage complex.

Ruppert hurried to his car, loving the sound of the door unlocking for him. As the door opened, he thought that maybe his precautions were good enough, that they didn’t actually know who’d used the computer, and he could get away clean if he was fast enough.

Then he heard the approaching whump-whump-whump of a helicopter, flying low. He looked up, and a searing white glare enveloped him.

Ruppert felt his whole body turn to ice. He wanted nothing more than to jump into his car and drive, but his arms and legs wouldn’t move. He stood trembling in the light like a stupid animal, staring up at it, giving the helicopter’s cameras a clear view of him as the wind from the rotors blasted his hair back from his face.

Then it was over. The light swept on down another alley of the complex as the helicopter pulled away from him.

The immobilizing fear collapsed into wild panic, and he leapt into his car and drove for the exit gate before the car's door had time to close.

As he chugged north through crushing traffic on the 405, he saw several more helicopters, mostly police, but also one very small black craft with no markings. One of the police crafts lingered above Ruppert’s car for what seemed like a very long time. The helicopter did not address him over its loudspeakers or seize control of his car’s systems, and finally it thundered away without incident.

In his mind, Ruppert chastised himself for his carelessness. He’d paid for the unit in cash, but he should have been prepared to destroy the computer at a moment’s notice. A baseball bat. A simple bucket of water to drop it in. Anything.

Terror would be able to track the computer to the storage unit. The manager might be able to describe Ruppert, though he hadn’t seen him since Ruppert rented the unit. Terror could eventually find one of Ruppert’s fingerprints or hairs. They could crosscheck with the videolog of the police helicopter that had studied him, if it had been the police. There were a thousand ways Terror could identify him if they wanted to go to the trouble.