Immunity Index by Sue Burke (best fiction books of all time txt) 📗

didn’t win, either.” She sat down heavily. “And I came back with a cold. Every last person there was coughing.”

Irene wanted to be at a protest or at least to share the excitement, and she couldn’t do either. Instead she checked the news incessantly, both official and friend to friend.

Mamá had left a message saying that she’d talk to Cal. Get him thrown out of the mutiny. And she’d send her the information again, “para que sepas cosas antes de mañana,” so you know things before tomorrow. Why tomorrow? Irene could guess. Tomorrow would be the mutiny. Finally!

Mamá also said she’d bring a tiny drone to record and broadcast the protest in Madison, and Irene could watch the feed. Ten minutes before one o’clock, she sat on a hay bale and tuned in. The protest today would set the stage for tomorrow.

The feed showed the area in front of City Hall in Madison. The drone was flying high enough to include a crowd in front gathered around what seemed to be a performer, and almost a block away, Mamá was standing with a group of people on a street corner. Was that Cal? She had her feed zoom in. Yes, Cal, and he was arguing with Mamá.

She noticed a movement to the west, moving fast. Centaurs. Security robots were dashing up the street.…

The feed went dead.

“Call Mamá!” she told her phone. Mamá’s phone didn’t acknowledge the call. Security centaurs could shut down electronics. Mamá must have been arrested.

Irene could barely breathe. Someone would have other news, they had to. Other friends? At least one of them for sure would have gone to the protest, but she asked five of them, and either they hadn’t been there or heard anything or their phones were not responding. She checked for news outside of Madison.

San Francisco’s mayor, a stalwart of old-fashioned freedom, only an hour ago had told people not to rally, saying that they wouldn’t be safe, so the city had no protest. The Prez’s network said nothing about protests. Instead its commentators were nattering about the burden communities and states would suffer if they were forced to take in people fleeing flooded homes in Florida unless the refugees would commit to—

Propaganda. Mamá had a network of artist-activists all over the country, and they’d tell the truth, at least whatever they knew of it. The artists weren’t talking about protest violence, but it was still two minutes before one o’clock.

Slowly, as Irene stared at her phone display, news began to trickle in. Noxious smoke bombs in Milwaukee caused a stampede. In Chicago, razor-edged confetti fell on the crowd from a drone, with reports of panic and bleeding. The protest in Washington, D.C., had been called off before it started. In New York City, almost no one came, and they were all arrested but not by city police, instead by federal agents of some sort. And so on.…

The big protest to start the mutiny had failed. Mamá had been arrested. And Cal. And then … sometimes people disappeared. Mamá!

She stood up and paced. She fiddled with her phone, checking every way she could think of, and she found some networks of activists or even friends that had suddenly been cut and more people whose phones didn’t respond. She called a couple of Mamá’s friends and left messages, as if they’d know something.

Nimkii seemed to sense her worry and touched his face with his trunk, a sign of anxiety. She came to the fence and talked.

“Yes, Nimkii, I am worried.” Her voice sounded strained even to her. “I don’t know what we can do, you and I.” He rumbled, a comforting sound, and raised his trunk to sniff for anything dangerous around them. If he caught a whiff of something he didn’t like, what would he do? She didn’t want him anxious, so she sent him a snack of evergreen boughs.

The lack of information hurt most of all. When she was little, she remembered being able to find out anything at a whim. Now, even the Prez’s supporters complained about all the limitations and censorship, but it didn’t matter. She could really only know what he wanted her to learn—in order to protect me from misinformation. And from dissent. At best, news could circulate below his radar, but not very much, and sometimes it was as false as the official news.

She sat on a bale of hay, staring at the phone on her wrist, picking nervously at the hay with her other hand. Nimkii made a sort of yelping roar, ignoring the snack she’d sent him. He stared at her, touching his face again. Did she look that upset? She didn’t want to have to answer questions from Alan, and some of her paranoia was reasonable. Anyone could be watching.

She stood up, took a deep breath, and tried to act normal. “Hey, you big pedazo, it’s so kind of you to be worried about me. But it’s my job to worry about you. You can eat the Christmas tree cuttings. I’ll stand here, nice and calm, and watch you.”

As she watched him, she also saw Alan leave the farmhouse and drive away. Before Nimkii had finished his snack, he returned with Ruby. He must have picked her up from her job, whatever she did that she hated so much. Alan was still coughing, pretty badly now. They went into the house.

Irene found herself pacing again. She needed to go somewhere, to do something, but what? As an anchor, Nimkii kept getting heavier.

My little basement cell seemed claustrophobic, panic-inducingly small, and silent as a tomb. Perhaps it was in fact a tomb, my sleep-deprived brain worried. Contact with the outside world had suddenly been cut off, although I had electricity and ventilation. (What microorganisms might be floating through the air?) Perhaps, everyone above me had died—not likely but not impossible, either, and the building’s infrastructure would carry on for a while through mechanical inertia.

I had time in that silence to brood over unanswerable questions.