James hurried between the long rows of cubicles, carefully avoiding eye contact with the people at their desks. The first trick every carrier learned was how to avoid eye contact. Looking leads to talking, talking to stopping, and the first and foremost thing a carrier never did was stop. No talking, no stopping. James could still hear the monotone drone of his Installer’s words like it had been yesterday—Plug in. Move.—repeated before and after each installation session. Repeated so often that it didn’t take a carrier trainee long to begin repeating them each time they took a step. And with a carrier installation taking more than a year to complete, James had said the words more times than he cared to imagine.
“The code is the only thing I need to teach you,” the Installer would say, which James and the rest of the trainees had quickly come to realize was a sign that they were about to receive a four hour lecture on some entirely different subject. The installations ranged from things like proper disk handling procedures, the history of information reception and transmission, and courses on subliminal mapping, understanding, and navigation of urban architecture, all the way to extensive physical fitness training, including training in weaponry and disk defense. Not to mention the months spent preparing for newsjacker attacks, which every carrier could expect to encounter sometime during their career. Their Installer prepared them for everything, including what to expect from life once their installation was complete, and they had all had their insertion points surgically installed.
“Your lives will change,” he’d said, offering no other explanation. “Your eyes will open.” James and the others had talked after training, before dropping off to sleep in the dormitories, but no one was ever quite sure what the Installer meant, although a few made a guess. How wrong they had all been.
We know now,” he thought, rounding a corner, hesitating only long enough to avoid running into another carrier moving in the opposite direction. Slide right and forward. Avoid eye contact. Plug in. Move. Plug in. Move. Not that another carrier would ever give him trouble. Ever stop.
Sessa. Without looking up he recognized the sound of her quick steps. The unmistakable bounce, rather than slide to the right. Talk had gone around that Sessa’s bounce had almost gotten her expelled from training. Dormitory talk. A long time ago. James put his head down and picked up speed, rounding the last corner and bursting through the doors of Legal. He’d made good time, he knew that, but already the disk in his chest had started to grow hot. In one fluid movement he’d stopped at Legal Input, reached into his jacket, withdrawn the disk from his chest, and inserted it into a slot on the computer in front of him. Habit almost forced him to look into the retinal scan, but he looked away at the last second, hoping no one was looking. He was getting too old. Disks were DNA encoded now, he knew that, but old habits were hard to break. Like Sessa and her bounce, he imagined.
He sat down on the couch, resting his legs for a minute as the Legal tech began to scan the images from the disk on the wall screen, deleting some sections, adding notes to others. It looked like a flood, James could see that. Looters and shooters. American even. Christ, was that New Orleans? No wonder the disk had gotten hot so fast. James watched as the legal tech replaced dead bodies in one scene with a close-up of a woman, hugging on tightly to a confused child. The screen split vertically and the tech dropped several acceptable alternate endings for the report, then popped the disk out and handed it back to James.
“Editing,” the Legal tech said. The disk already felt hot inside of him, James thought, although he knew it couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be that hot out there. New Orleans. He’d heard of it and seen a thousand images over the years, but he’d never imagined it’d get that hot down there, just like no one else would if he did his job right.
He wondered if Sessa was on her way back, then hit the door running, the sound of his feet pounding down the long hall washing away all his thoughts.