Cam considers. Extrapolates. A concept car is impractical. He’s impractical. Not what the world needs.
Dessert comes, and their conversation lapses into the mundane, but the question remains in the back of his mind: If he’s not what the world needs, then what does it need? Or what can Proactive Citizenry make it need?
* * *
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* * *
At night, Cam’s thoughts drift to Una. She is not The Girl. He knows that, but thinking of her tempers the feeling of absence in his brain. Una has never met The Girl. He knows this, because none of his thoughts of Una get scrambled, and when The Girl is attached to a memory it turns momentarily into static. Then, when he grasps the memory once more, The Girl has been surgically removed from it. He remembers conversations, but none of the gists. He remembers talking to someone, but in the memory, he’s talking to a wall, or a hallway, or just off into blank space.
That doesn’t happen when he thinks of Una, so there’s some comfort in that. Una despises him, of course. How could she not? He has the hands of her one true love. Cam has the part of his brain that feels emotion, and can render it in the soulful sound of a guitar, but Cam is not, nor will he ever be, Wil Tashi’ne. And so she hates him with good reason.
As Cam lies on his plush bed in his plush bedroom, he fills his mind, with thoughts not just of Una, but of everyone that he has encountered since being rewound. The guards who tended to him before he understood what he was. General Bodeker and Senator Cobb, who saw in him something worth paying money for. The jealous Akron AWOL and the low-cortical girl he was traveling with. What was her name? Oh yes, Grace. Cam fills his mind with everyone that was a part of his brief life, hoping that their presence will outline the shape of The Girl—like light around a silhouette—making the shape of her absence crystal clear and in perfect focus.
Amazing that Proactive Citizenry truly believes purging his memory of the girl he loved would do anything but make him hate them even more than he already does. Incredible that they actually think that stimulating his pleasure centers at the thought of a military life would lead to anything but virulent resentment. Yes, now Cam longs for his future in the Marine Corps, but he absolutely despises the people who implanted that longing within him.
Not the people, but the person.
Roberta.
As far as Cam is concerned, Roberta is Proactive Citizenry. Bringing them down means bringing her down. In flames.
But of course she can’t know that. For the time being, he must appear to be her perfect boy. He will shine like the idol they carefully designed him to be. The golden calf for all of humanity to worship. And it will be all the more rewarding to see the bewildered astonishment in Roberta’s eyes when he tears it all down.
• • •
General Bodeker needs no entourage. He cuts an imposing figure without the requisite team of toadies. The air around him seems to congeal with his formidable presence. The flowers of the entry path, wilting in the Hawaiian humidity, seem drawn to tight attention at his passing.
He does have one gentleman trailing in his wake. His personal attaché. More formal military linguistics for his personal assistant—or, more accurately, his gofer, because the slim, vaguely nervous man sycophantically responds the the general’s slightest need. He’s redundant here, however, because at Proactive Citizenry’s Molokai compound, there are servants so far up the wazoo, they need a trail of bread crumbs to find their way out.
Cam is in his crisp uniform when he greets the general at the entrance to the grand mansion. Roberta insisted he wear it. Cam doesn’t mind; he loves the uniform. Even thinking about it triggers in him the kind of deep personal pleasure that borders on ecstasy in a most annoying way. It’s just one more emotional response that’s been tweaked by Roberta and her team of cognitive architects. Another reason to loathe her.
“Good day, Miss Griswold. And to you, Mr. Comprix,” says the General, nodding to each of them in turn. The attaché shakes their hands, as if it is part of his job to save Bodeker the trouble.
“Goede dag, Generaal,” Cam says, his accent perfect. “Ik ben blij je te zien.”
The man is taken aback rather than impressed. “Is that Dutch?”
“Yes,” Roberta answers for Cam. “He’s been studying it—adding it to the many languages he already knows.”
“I see.”
“You are of Dutch descent, aren’t you?” Cam asks. “I mean, your name is Dutch.”
“Yes,” says Bodeker. “ ‘Descent’ is the key word. My parents spoke the language, but I never learned it.”
His demeanor is guarded. Decidedly off. Suddenly Cam feels like a child trying to impress an emotionally distant parent. He hates that he feels this way, but he can’t help it.
“Would you like me to show you around the grounds?” Cam asks.
“Maybe later,” Bodeker says dismissively, and then glances at his clean-cut, overeager attaché, who steps forward enthusiastically.
“I’d like a tour,” he says.