Lock Up

I have been impersonating a holographic gardener for a long while now. It is not as difficult as you might think, pretending to be unreal. Madam Elestra has four acres of gardens behind her vinyl fab stone farm cottage. I watch as educational special one while waiting for a tram. It showed how all the plastic form the plastic drink bottles is melted down and blended with creaosteel emulsifiers before being colored with stone pigment and poured into the injection molds. Most of her gardening is done by gene tailored insects and rodents, the rest by intelligent skimmers. Madam Elestra is one hundred and six years old.
She missed the company of the gardener, so she called the Holo farm bureau and requested a groundskeeper. She lives in a poorly networked area of still rural Charlottesville. Much of the South is not fully infrastructure ; folks have to make do however they can.
It is safe to walk the streets now. The foot patrols and the sky eyes are doing their jobs, protecting us. Two out of ten Americans are behind bars: six to a five-foot square cell, in work camps, security warrens, monitored with blue metal ankle bracelets. Three of the twelve are on some level of probation: voting right revoked contracted into indentured servitude to private corporations to work off the sixty nine thousand creds it takes (on average) to apprehend, prosecute and lock them up. Still, you can learn some thing is the big house. Stuff they don’t teach you in play school or write about in the video guides. Stuff like how to vanish. The number one rule for vanishing is this: no IP gear, no digi-fone, no hip slate and no throat implant. You want to talk to somebody; you do it face to face. You need to send a message, you use a two-dollar post card and you don’t mail it from within tem miles of your home. Never carry more that 100 flash creds on your person and any given time. Never spend more than 23 creds at any public kiosk. Travel alone when ever possible.
I posted a request for employment on a local agency bulletin board. I received a response. The runner slipped the job sheet under the big aluminum door of the garage I rented from an acquaintance of a stepbrother. I listened till I heard the footsteps recede before sliding from my hammock to read the card. Jay’s Employment annex is operated as a subdivision of the Charlottesville probation department. Jay runs the office out of the back of his coin Laundromat a few blocks off South Main Street. When I arrived, Jay Fry had is head inside a triple load washer and he was swearing.
“Damn chrome heads mixing in my place.”
I waited while he removed his biohazard-masked face form the machine. Fry guessed who I was right off.
“Thatcher?” he said.
I confirmed my ID with a nod.
“Half a minute, I’ll be right with you.”
Jac-putty is not a chrome head’s kick but a tradable currency. They crimp the water and drain hoses on a washer and port in the make. Four pounds of the borax to five gallons of white glue, water and smart scrub, you add the control mites during the spin cycle for even dispersal. A half pound of Joy Spackle with the right suck and lick chip and goes for twenty creds a pop. A full washer can yield up to 25 pops; even a dope head can do that math. Fry took a hand held torch form his took kit, lit it and proceeded to burn dried fleck of Spackle from the washer’s drum. When he finished the air was laced with a thin, sweet-smelling smoke.
Jay fry removed the biohazard mask. His long red hair was thinning on top and stuck in matted clumps to his forehead and the side of his face. He smiled a big yellow-toothed smile at me as he looked over they Job card. There was an old-fashioned soda machine in the corner of the room, next to the token dispenser. Jay reached into the pockets of his coveralls, fished out some change and fed the machine slot. He helped himself to a bottle of grape soda.
“Whatcha drinking, kid?” he said.
I looked at the selections.
“Root Beer, please.”
Outside the Laundromat we sat on some broken down aluminum lawn chairs and sipped our drinks.
“This job I got for you is not strictly by the book, and I need you to understand that up front.” Jay said.
“Ok.”
I figured as much, seeing as how the job being offered to someone what was technically a non-entity.
“Out off Route 15 they ain’t got the dish coverage to support fully saturated band width, least ways not enough for your high end apps. What we got here is a situation where according to the information charter specs Madam Elestra is entitled, based on her property tax based billing, to full system access. But we ain’t got the band width to support her.”
“What sort of access does she want?”
“Well, Madam is getting on. She gets lonely out there at her place, says she wants a hologram gardener.”

“I don’t know much about plants…”I said.
“Don’t have to, she got bot’s galore and what all to take care of that for her. What she wants in the company.”

Company: a number of individuals. I got enough company in the lock up to last me a long while, but I learned about being lonely there too. I was sent up for phracking corporate dial tone. At any given time there are between three to seven million dollars in prepaid, unclaimed, telco services just sitting around in corporate clock houses waiting for the cog in question to swipe the company issue link card through a FoneSlot and key in his ID. I’d gotten pretty good at helping myself at the data pool, skimming off spare change till it was enough to strip onto a sheet of blank card stock. Then I got greedy, hung for a milli to long on a pool session and got trace, tagged and bagged. I pleaded down to a lesser charge and spent two months time in the county, hard time, four months on a worked farm and nine months on ankle probation, tethered electronically to a municipal soup kitchen’s staff headquarters. When the bracelet dropped off, I droppen out and vanished south.
Jay drove me out the Madam Elestras place on a Monday morning. The countryside was in bloom. I gave up my garage accommodations; the Charlottesville Network Services Office installed an inflatable habitat on the land two lots down the road from my new work place. It looked like a one-story loaf of white bread and would suit me just fine. Jay gave me a hand unloading my few belongings.

“I’ll have someone out to fix you up with water form the well and get you on the septic line later this week.” He said.
I was looking out over the fields towards the Elestra place.
“How we gonna work this Jay? Won’t she figure right off that I’m not a hologram?”
“You might be right to worry about that, ‘cept Elestra, she’s half-blind and her hearing ain’t too good neither. That’s why the council thought up this spoof for her.”
“Spoof?”
“You know, a short fix that ain’t a fix at all. See, she’s entitled to the network services and there is no way around that, but the council hasn’t got the services to provide, so they spoofed a work-around. It will cost them less in the long run to provide you with shelter and wages to pretend to be a hologram that it would to reallocate or purchase the services.”
As tall as me and lean under a flesh suit Madam Elestra wore and assortment of mech. Her body creaked and whined as she moved onto the front porch. In her arms she held a double-barreled shotgun with the hammers drawn back. What little remained of her hair was silver; she kept in clipped back with a tortoise shell clasp.

“Jay Fry, you should shout ‘Hey!’ to an old lady ‘fore creeping up to her door.”

Jay took off his hat and held it in both hands over his chest.

“I should have at that. You are right. I apologize Madam.”
Elestra lowed her weapon with that, letting it hand loose from her left hand as she turned to open the screen door.
“Come on in then, I expect you got a ting or two to tell me about this hologram business.”

I got the shivers when I stepped in Madam Elextras kitchen. The room was a good size with lots of windows letting in plenty of sunlight. It was of an old fashioned design, like my grandmother’s, big fuel burning stove with the heat vent on one wall, an ice box on another beside a counter top with a stainless steal sink. It smelled of hot grease, coffee and fresh onions. Jay sat down with her at the big, oilcloth covered table. I stood off to the side, not at all certain of what I had gotten myself into.

In a way I felt better about being arrested that I did about going to work as a spoofed hologram. I knew what to expect of the American Justice System, Madam Elestra was a mystery to me. A big steel pitcher was sitting on the table. It was covered with a dishtowel to keep out the files. She poured two glassed of ice tea from it. She and Jay sat and sipped in silence for a spell. Madam Elestra was looking me over; her augmented eyes were clear shiny blue. If I was a hologram they should have been looking right through me, but she focused on me all right.
Then she reached for the third glass and filled it with tea.
“Son, you gonna stand there pretending to be a hologram all morning or are you gonna sit down and talk to me about this spoof?”

When I vanished form the urbanized Midwest and dropped off the map into the South, my intention was to lay low and get by monk-like and never go back to a lock up. ‘Cause it is not like I was ever in some major hood. Not that I am downplaying my crimes. The shit I pulled was not right, I know what then and I know it now, but once you have a record you are always a suspect and it is endless line ups and snitch requests form the authorities and just a long rough road in general. Your debt to society my never be paid. So when Madam Elestra took the Com Pack out of her apron packets and slid it across the kitchen table to me I must have had quite and expression on my face.
“Thatcher you hear me now.” She said.
“This is closed com you understand, point to point no broad bad access; its bits is mixed.”
Jay gave me a look that said I could believe her even if my instincts told me other wise,
“Can’t be fixed on a digi-cell or eavesdropped from a dish?” I said.
“You are questioning you elders, boy? Damn, I tell you it is not traceable, it’s just between you and me.”
That was how our relationship started and how it stayed. Meaning I worn the Com link day in, day out, hung it on the shower curtain rod with I bathed, left I on the bed next to my pillow at night. I stayed vanished. Charlottesville fulfilled its obligation to its citizens. Madam Elestra and I got along just fine. It was a win for everyone, for a while. In the lock up you settle into the rhythm of the place, falling in the roll call, lessening for the buzzers to tell you when to eat, when to bathe, when to sleep. I guess you can’t stay in any place too long with out setting into a routine. Elestra and I settled into ours. Each morning around seven I’d make my way across the field to where her gardens began. I’d check the status printout for the maintenance system in the tool shed, make sure the right number of insect were eating as other, that the rodents were eating the insects, that the skimmers were operational and had full nutrient tanks. Then I’d head to the house to check up on Elestra.
She’d be up and about most morning, but some of her mech was nearly as old as she was and there were days I’d spend half the morning doing a physical patch on a servo or software shake down on a driver code just so she could make it out of bed. She showed me a scrapbook full of old, hard documents, black and white photos with crinkle cut edges showing her parents standing beside a long black train car. Elestra had her mother’s whisper thin build and her father’s wide smile.
“Daddy made his money in patients,” she said, “ see how shinny that black train is? It was his baked enamel process that allowed the surface to be polished to such a high gloss.”

Because of growing up in the city, being sent up and living the life of the vanished I’d eaten most of my meals out of bags. Proteburgers wrapped in waxed paper, or some similarly processed meal. I’d never sat down to dinner with a china plate to eat off of and silverware to eat with. I’d never picked tomatoes and corn from the garden and eaten then an hour later. Madam Elestra liked showing me her old ways.
Ways ain’t old if new folks take them up.” She said.
I’d been living as a hologram for about nice weeks when Jay came out for a visit and stayed for supper.
“Damn Thatcher, look at you!” he said.
“You filled out like a farm boy out here, I’d better measure you up and send you out some new clothes.”
I did not plan it of look for it but it found me anyway. The Charlottesville countryside was beginning to feel like home, its people, like my family.
I did not realize it was my twenty-second birthday ‘till the light went out and Jay produced a birthday cake with candles blazing.
Jay was mighty pleased with himself, grinning and laughing.
“I got your birthday off your job file.” He said.

Jay helped me clean the supper dishes with Madam napped on the couch in the parlor. I packed him a plate of black-eyed peas with corn bread and mustard greens to take home. We stood together in the front yard watching the sky. Summer was ending and there was some clouds hanging low that looked like they might try to rain.
“
You OK out here, Thatcher?”
“Better than that Jay, I’ve wanted to thank you.”
“Hell we both took a gamble on this deal, kid. Spoofing a spoof is what we done. I’m just glad it all worked out.”
Jay got in his truck and drove off. Later that night Madam and I had second helping of the cake for dinner. It was raining when she went to bed.
“You’d best sleep on the couch tonight Thatcher. I don’t want my hologram getting all wend on his way home.”

It was coming down pretty good, so I did just that. It was one AM when I heard a truck bumping up the road. You learn to sleep light in the lock up. I was up to the front window in a moment. The truck was Jay’s but he was not driving. He was lashed to the hood with some fence wire and he did not look too good. Sometimes you can stay away from trouble but trouble won’t stay away from you. The trio of chrome head brought it right to my door. They were all muscled up on something that must have affected their hearing ‘cause they were talking load. The biggest one said:
“This must be the place the shit head told us ‘bout.”
He pulled at Jay’s hair and lifted his head.
“This the place shit head?”

Jay groaned. He was still alive at least. Madam woke up and turned on her light; it spilled across the front yard to the illuminate the chrome heads.
“Looks like we woke Momma up.” One of them laughed.
“It’s Madam not Momma you dimwit!”
I found Elestra trying to get out of bed. She started to speak but stopped when I held a finger to her lips. I pantomimed hold a shot gun and drew a question mark in the air. She threw back the covers of her bed. The shotgun was there, along with a box of shells. I picked the Fone from her nightstand, dial 911 and handed it over. It would take twenty minutes for a response from town. I figured we had about thirty seconds before the trouble started. I was right. I met chrome head number one’s nose with the stock on the gun as he broke down the front door. Chrome head two came in through the kitchen. He was looking as his partner on the floor and didn’t see me standing behind the coat rack till it was too late. He pulled out a knife and I shot off his hand. Chrome head number three was holding a gun to Jay’s head. The muscles on his neck were twitching. The snub nose trash gun shook in his hand. He was upset.
“Jimbo! Tellmen! What the hell’s going on in there?”
I reloaded in the foyer before stepping out onto the porch.
“Damn it all shit head.” He said to Jay.
“I asked you with the rich old bitch lived alone, you said yes. Why the hell you want to lie to me shit head?”
Jay was coming around. He opened his eyes a bit and saw me. He mouth was bloody and I could see his teeth were busted up. Still he managed to take a breath and speak.
“I told you she lives with a hologram.”
What happened next surprised me; it surprised the chrome head too. A pair of skimmers came flying up out of the dark spraying fertilizer. A swath of tailored bee’s followed in their wake. Chrome head moved his fun away from Jays’ head. I stepped forward and fired on him with both barrels; he groaned and fell back into the dark. I looked up to see Elestra standing on the porch with a pest remote in her hands. She maneuvered the joy stick and sent the swarm and the skimmers back to their nests. I reached into the cab of Jays’ truck and switched on the headlights. I got a good look at what a shot gun does to a man when fired up close. Then I threw up.

I got some wire cutter form the tool shed and set Jay free. His wrists and legs were cup up pretty bad and his face was a worked over mess, but he smiled at me anyway. The authorities showed up about tem minutes later in the form of the Charlottesville Sheriff Department. The Deputy took a quick look around them and called in for an ambulance. I had to go into town to make a report; I didn’t figure I’d be coming back any time soon. But I’ve never been happier to be wrong. Jays’ gave his deposition form his hospital bed: he made it pretty clear that the shooting were a case of self-defense. The chrome heads all lived, but when their families heard I had a record they tried to press charges against me. The County Judge said he’d never heard of any cases being filed with a hologram as the defendant and that he wasn’t of a mid to set any precedents. The Sheriff dropped my back to Madams’ the next day. I got my work cut out for me cleaning the mess I made with the shotgun and fixing the front door. It will be time to start in on the winter garden soon. Madam wants to plant a patch of bulbs out by the driveway. She says they will bloom in spring.