on my butt. I own this number – or it owns me – for perhaps thirty more minutes. Today I am getting out.
I don’t need to tell you my name. The whole world already knows it.
The steel gate clangs as it slides open, triggered by the guard in the booth. Clanging gate, silent electronic trigger: old technology manipulated by new. But of course that scenario doesn’t always end well. The whole world knows that now, too, due at least in part to me.
Two more clangs and I reach the lobby. A clerk hands me the personal effects I surrendered fifteen years ago: lipstick, pocket flashlight, cheap watch, massively outdated cell phone. I’m already wearing my own clothes. Jeans and sweatshirt don’t date that much.
The clerk smiles. “Good luck, Ms –” he glances at his tablet “– Jaworski.”
Incredibly, he does not recognize me. But, then, he appears to be about fifteen, although surely that can’t be true. So perhaps the whole world doesn’t recognize my name, after all.
The only man who matters will recognize it. He shares it.
Wayne is waiting at the prison gates, at the wheel of a sleek black car. He’s grown a short beard, which oddly enough gives him the look of an Edwardian dandy. He’s fifty now but still looks good; he’s one of those men who only get better looking as they age. He leans over to kiss me, then answers my disapproval before I can even voice it. “Electric, not gas, and the juice comes from the Green River Dam. No carbon footprint, no resource depletion.”
“And the rubber tires will never end up in a landfill? You’ll paint them white and plant daisies in them on the front lawn?”
He grins at me. “Prison hasn’t changed you, Caitlin.”
The fuck it hasn’t. But Wayne doesn’t need to know that. He has another girlfriend now, and she’s pregnant, and anyway he’s too valuable an eco-fighter to risk. Despite the car.
“So who does it belong to?”
“Friend of a friend.”
“Dangerous, Wayne.”
“This one can be trusted.”
“None of them can be trusted. You used to know that.”
He doesn’t answer. Fifteen years ago, it was someone we trusted who tipped off the CEO of HomeWalls, Inc.
I say, “Are we going to the compound?”
He glances over at me. “Would you rather I take you somewhere else?”
We both know I don’t have anywhere else to go. I gaze out the window at the shimmer in the distance and yes, as we speed along the highway toward Spokane in traffic even lighter than when I went into prison, there is the first of them. The shimmer takes form, an upside-down translucent bowl. Wayne speeds up and I say sharply, “No. Pull over. I want to look at it.”
“Caitlin –”
“Do it!”
He does, and I look my fill, letting the look sink deep into my mind, where it can become rich fertilizer to nourish equally rich hatred.
The dome, a singleton, covers perhaps thirty acres: Model C-2, then, the largest possible. Sunlight striking at just the right angle glints off it, as if it were solid. It is not. The HomeWalls dome is a force field, proprietary to the corporation. It keeps out objects, including projectiles, air, and selective wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. Visible light can get through; X-rays, gamma rays, microwaves cannot. The bowl shape is open at the top, to allow air exchange and weather, and through the opening rises a single communication tower. I stare a long time at that curve up to the opening, which is as small as the engineers deemed feasible.
The dome entrance, with its heavily guarded double-door access chamber, must be on the other side, at the end of the road merging into the highway. Through the translucent wall, which is precisely 1.8 inches ‘thick’, I see the blurred outlines of houses, a few shops and restaurants, a small apartment building, trees and flowerbeds and a tennis court. Two people on bicycles ride on the bike path that circles fairly close to the wall. The translucence gives everything the wavery,
Tracie Peterson, Judith Pella