“Congratulations,” said Larry. “You’ve raised the most pathetic army the world has ever seen.” Their entire band of revolutionaries had gathered together for an announcement—tie-dyed potheads, wrinkled hippies, tattooed vegan goths with more piercings than skin. Seventy-four forgotten, angry people who only fit in with each other.
Larry hated them.
“Try to get over it,” said Susan, leaning against their van. “This movement is bigger than the people in it.”
“For the record,” said Larry, “I also hate calling it a movement. It’s like we’re pooping out justice.”
“Wait,” said Tony/Fabio. “Isn’t that why we call it a movement? Now I’m disappointed.”
“We need revolutionaries,” said Larry, “not … hippies.”
“These are both,” said Susan. “Everyone we recruited knows this is a war, and they’re ready to fight.”
“They’re tree huggers,” said Tony/Fabio.
Susan shook her head. “They’re more likely to spike a tree than hug it.”
“Fine,” said Larry, “we have our revolution, and then we’re done with them. Only a raging idiot would want to let that pack of Communist baristas rebuild anything resembling a government.”
“The new world’s going to have Communist baristas in it, too,” said Susan. “You may as well just get used to it.”
“As long as they stay baristas and not politicians.”
“You’re not a politician, either,” said Tony/Fabio, “you’re a hired gun. Who says you get to make all the important decisions?”
“I’m not saying I do,” said Larry, “I’m just saying that they’re idiots. And they’re Socialists, which is redundant.”
“We never used to fight,” said Tony/Fabio with mock sadness. “I think you liked me better as a woman.”
“I think I liked you better as a prisoner,” said Larry.
“Let’s get this meeting started,” said Susan. She walked to the front of the group and shouted for their attention. “All right!” she said. “Eyes up here.” The room quieted. “It’s time for the next phase—we’ve built our revolution, we’ve laid all the groundwork, and now it’s time to make it happen. We want change!”
The group shouted back in agreement.
Susan ticked off each point on her fingers. “We want the government to change. We want their policies to change. We want their vision to change. We want their attitude to change. But more than anything, more than anything in the whole world, we want ReBirth to change. We want it to disappear. We want every last drop of it destroyed.”
The crowd murmured their approval, and Susan paced back and forth, stoking their anger. “Kuvam calls this a world without fear, but I’m still afraid. He calls this a world without death, but people are dying every day. You know what I call this? A world without meaning. A world without logic. There are five million Lyles is this world now, and nobody knows where they’re coming from. There are nearly thirty million other victims, in thousands of makes and models. Nobody knows if they’re going to wake up one morning as somebody else—as Lyle, or as Victoria Carver, or as some half-dead cancer boy in a corrupt government takeover.”
The crowd cheered even louder at this—if there was one thing Larry and the hippies shared, it was a passionate distrust of the government.
“Today,” said Susan, “I’m going to introduce you to the next phase of our plan. We tried to scare them, to show them how terrifying a world with ReBirth can truly be, but they’re not scared. They think they can’t be scared—that their ReBirth factories and their hazmat suits and their ivory towers can keep them safe, but we’re going to show them. Bring him out.”
Larry and Tony/Fabio opened the van, opened the crate in the back of it, and led their guest toward the dais.
“You’ve been collecting blank lotion,” said Susan to the revolutionaries. “You’ve been stealing it on the streets and taking it from the government and scrounging it in every corner of the country. Now we have enough, and we’re going to teach the world to be afraid again. We’re going to cross the bridge to Manhattan, break into the UN, and turn every world leader in there into this guy.”
Larry brought their guest up onstage, and he spread his lips in a wide, leering grin and hooted madly.
“This is Mr. Bubbles,” said Susan. “He’s a chimpanzee.”
51
Monday, November 26
5:48 P.M.
Lyle Camp 6, Upstate New York
18 DAYS TO THE END OF THE WORLD
Lyle had managed to lay low for three and a half weeks now, and was confident he could do it indefinitely if it came to that. He knew the facility already, of course, and could navigate it more easily than the other Lyles, but that wasn’t the main thing. He could stay hidden simply because he was the only Lyle in the complex who wanted to. The others were clamoring to get out, buying and selling their slots in the interview queue, desperate for any chance to convince the guards that they didn’t belong here, that they needed to be somewhere else, that they had a real life and a real identity, and could you please help me get back to it? In a crowd like that, Lyle could hide forever. He sold his queue slot day after day, digging himself deeper and deeper into the interminable wait in exchange for a piece of bread or a packet of beans. He wanted nothing, and the camp asked nothing of him.
On some level, this bothered him.
It wasn’t that he wanted to get out; the Lyle Camp wasn’t wonderful, but for a man facing death row it was a welcome alternative. What bothered him was his own lack of ambition. Just months ago he had been important—he had been the chief scientist of one of the largest health and beauty companies in the world. He had made things. He had accomplished things. He had created and dreamed and lived. And now he was just sitting in a derelict factory, biding his time, waiting for … for what? For the prison guards to get bored and give up? For the government to change its policies? For the world to fall apart in some kind of nuclear apocalypse? How did he think this was going to end?
“Maybe it never will,” he mused, but that was the whole problem. The idea that endless sameness could appease him. When had he become this man, so willing to sit and wait while the world moved around him? Or maybe he’d always been like this. He tried to think back to the things he’d done before, to what a “normal” life had been for him. Wake up in the morning; take the train to work; talk to Susan; endure a meeting with Cynthia; take the train home; watch Star Trek; eat a low-salt meal, maybe a piece of chicken and a plate of brussels sprouts.
Brussels sprouts. The Ibis Lyles had said they’d inherited his taste for them, as if the genetic code for the layout of his tongue had somehow predisposed them to love the flavor. Lyle sat on a catwalk above the factory floor and watched the Lyles mill around below him, hundreds in here and thousands more outside. New ones every day, each a tiny variation of the unique individual Lyle used to think he was. Did they all like brussels sprouts? Did they all watch Star Trek? Did they all lead quiet, unassuming lives, never making waves, the same routine for years on end? Lyle had never had ambition, he realized. He’d become a scientist because he was good at it, because it came naturally to him. He’d gone into cosmetics because the opportunity was there, fresh out of college, and after he’d paid his dues and gotten his job experience he’d never bothered moving on. He didn’t speak up. He didn’t change.
“How many of you actually lived your lives,” he called down. Nine hundred identical faces looked up, some finding him immediately, some searching in confusion for the source of the voice. “How many of you actually have something to go back to, something real, something that isn’t just this, in a different building, in a different face: just milling around and pretending that it all means something?”
Some of the faces found him; some of them spotted some other Lyle on the same catwalk and looked at him instead. Lyle stood up, abruptly furious at the relentless nothingness that had defined his entire life. “How many of you have never made any real decisions? You sit there, at your desk in your cubicle, at your desk in your dorm room, at your stupid counter in your dead-end job slapping cheese onto somebody else’s sandwiches. This isn’t the life you wanted? Well, that one wasn’t, either. The only difference now is that the blinders are gone, and the truth is right in front of you, and you can’t pretend you’re unique anymore just because you don’t look like every other face in the world. Because now you do. Now it’s obvious. Now you’re just me, and I’m you, and we’re all him, and him, and him, and none of it means anything. You all want your lives back? How many of you actually used them for anything?”
Some of the Lyles yelled back angrily; some talked to each other; some dropped their heads or slinked into corners. Lyle yelled again: “How many? How many?” Suddenly a hundred identical fingers pointed up, not at Lyle but off to his left, and he looked up just in time to watch himself climb onto the railing of the catwalk and step off, arms pinwheeling as he fell a hundred feet to the floor. A hundred Lyles shouted in one voice, scrambling out of the way.
