Armed Memory by Jim Young

Author:Jim Young [Young, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780812550276
Publisher: Tor Science Fiction
Published: 1995-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWELVE

Testimony of Timothy J. Wandel

It seems funny now, but I didn't find out that Ray-Lee had been arrested until after I got home and heard it on the news one night. Eventually she got fined, spent six months in jail, and had five years' probation with several thousand hours of unpaid "socially contributory" work tossed in. But she was lucky—she got no mandatory therapy.

I wish I'd been able to attend Ray-Lee's trial, but I didn't have the time. They did call me to be a witness at a pretrial hearing, and I keep trying to tell myself that what I said on the witness stand then helped Ray-Lee. But that was all I was able to manage. When the company was dissolved, I didn't have a job anymore, so I did a crash course in writing resumes.

Worse yet, one of those memos in the envelope that the guy from the government had handed me was an eviction notice. They were seizing my apartment as part of the company's assets, and I had a month to get out.

At least I wasn't charged with being an accessory, like some of the surviving research people up in Connecticut.

For a couple of weeks I thought I'd be able to land some kind of full time writing job. I had three interviews and got one offer. It paid well enough, but there wasn't any housing allowance, so I had to turn it down.

About then my friends Alice and Moustapha called me to say they were moving to Vancouver. I lied and told them things were going okay for me. After we said goodbye, I stared at the phone in my apartment for a couple of minutes. I had one less place to stay if I wanted to remain in New York.

Sometimes you just can't escape home at all. There wasn't any way I could stay where I was. But then, there wasn't anything keeping me there, either. So I called my sister, and she said I could crash with her for a few weeks until I got on my feet. After that I did a little freelance work for Monica over at Scope magazine. I earned enough to buy a bus ticket and headed back to Minneapolis.

I don't think I've ever felt as wasted and crumpled up and thrown away as on that bus ride. A lot of the time I kept blaming myself for getting sucked into the whole thing, and then it occurred to me that maybe microding had made us think we could outrun all of our problems, death and the hammerheads included. I'm pretty sure that escape was part of what was going on in Johnny's head when he started his work on bioengineering; and it was probably inside me, more than I figured.

The first night on the bus, I barely slept at all. I'm too tall now to fit comfortably into one of those things. Maybe that's why I had this strange dream-memory, somewhere before a bleak February dawn in Ohio, when I was in a kind of hallucinogenic state near sleep.

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