Pennsylvania

Chapter 7 New Pennsylvania

Indeed, Dawn did owe Donavan. She owed him even more after they arrived at the underground BICE chop shop, and Dawn discovered that Jed had hidden the gold coin in his pod. This little fact triggered another loud argument between Dawn and Donavan. In the end, after Dawn admitted that this time, she really, really, really owed him big-time, Donavan agreed to go back to the station for the coin. Jed told him precisely where it was, and Donavan wrote down the pod number on a piece of paper so he could remember it.

There was one last argument when Dawn told Donavan that she wasn’t going to pay him the six hundred thousand unis until he returned with the coin, but this time the hostility storm blew in fast and didn’t last long. Jed heard Donavan curse under his breath as he left.

Dawn went under the knife first. Removing a BICE was a complicated but minor operation, and they only used some form of local anesthetic. Jed and Jerry sat against a far wall, and the operation took place in the middle of an expansive room and not in any kind of specialty operating theater. A slice was made along the hairline at the rear of the neck, and the BICE unit was removed with practiced precision. They’ve done this before, Jed noted.

Jed and Jerry talked during Dawn’s operation, but there wasn’t too much they could say. All they had were questions, and there weren’t many answers to those questions available to them. They were both just glad to be alive, and no matter how bad it was here, they both agreed that it had to be better than if they’d been sent to Oklahoma. At least now they had a lifeline, however tentative it might be.

Jerry went to the operating table next, but before he did, Dawn instructed him on how to transfer the unis from his TRID to Jed’s wristband. Once the unis were on the band, Jerry headed to the table and Dawn filled Jed in on some of the things that were happening—or at least, what he could expect to happen next. TRID removal was a lot easier than removing a BICE, Dawn told him, and it wasn’t nearly as dangerous. Being caught without a TRID was what was dangerous.

She told Jed that she hadn’t expected to come on this trip, even right up to the moment when she’d given him the note and the coin. Coming along was a last-minute exigency that she’d have to explain in greater detail later.

They needed the gold to get into the Amish Zone. Getting to the AZ meant that they would have to travel safely through the battle that currently raged all around them in this new world, and there was only one man Dawn knew who could accomplish such a thing. That man was her cousin. Pook Rayburn.

* * *

A harrowing walk of a few blocks through a darkened city under siege brought them to Pook’s place of business. From all appearances, Merrill’s Grocery Supply was mostly a bombed-out shell of its former self. Broken crates of canned and packaged groceries and kitchen supplies were scattered helter-skelter around the place, and Jed was surprised when they found Pook Rayburn himself still working at his desk in his second-floor office.

“What in the world happened here?” Dawn asked, as she gave her cousin a hug.

“Which world?” Pook replied with a wink. “We happened here. We—that is, the resistance—happened. It’s a major offensive. This is the closest they’ve ever come to the City. I barely learned about it in time to warn you. I’m glad you made the trip. There probably won’t be any more after yours.”

“It’s that bad?”

“For now it is.” Pook placed a file he’d been looking at back on his desk and sat down, indicating that the rest of them should sit down too.

Jed was surprised to notice that there were no computers, no electronic devices anywhere to be seen. Jerry must have noticed the same thing, because he leaned over to Jed and whispered to him. “Apparently the resistance is purely analog… like you folks in the Amish!”

Pook overheard the jest and smiled. “All of this,” he pointed to the paperwork and files on his desk, “this all has to do with my legitimate business. Everything else, I keep up here,” he said, pointing to his head. “Anything digital can be traced and tracked. A lot of things that are not digital can be traced and tracked. We try to avoid leaving a signature anywhere, but…” He hesitated a moment before speaking again. “…But as this war develops, it seems that there are no guarantees about anything. I suppose uncertainty is always the product of any war…” Pook looked up and appeared to decide against whatever it was he had been going to say.

“How did the trip go?” Pook asked.

“Not bad when you consider how bad it could have been,” Dawn said with a sigh. “Things have obviously gone downhill since I was here last. The biggest road bump was when Jed here and his new friend Jerry got pinched by Transport for insurrectionist conversations during their holo-trip.”

Pook looked at Jed and nodded his approval, as if he were impressed. Jed responded silently by pointing at Jerry.

“That’s a story you’ll have to tell me later.” Pook looked at his cousin. “Do you have the gold to get yourself into the AZ?”

“Donavan had to go back and get it from the station.”

“Donavan?” Pook snorted with obvious dissatisfaction.

“Jed thought he was busted, and he hid the gold in the seat of his pod.”

Pook nodded again. “Okay… well… Jed here is a thinker. I’ll give him that, for sure. How do we know Donavan won’t skedaddle with the gold?”

“I told him I wasn’t paying for the exfil or the BICE removal until he shows up with the gold.”

“Clever of you. Not so much of him. Doesn’t he know that unis are basically worthless?”

“Apparently not.”

“Well let’s hope he gets here with the gold before he finds out,” Pook said with a wink. He stood up and walked toward the door. “We’ll have to go next door to the antique shop, that’s where I keep the Transport forms for the AZ.”

* * *

Merrill’s Antique Shoppe had been spared most of the damage from the recent battles that the grocery supply building had suffered. Pook unlocked the door with an old-fashioned metal key, and as they walked in, only a faint blue-grey light from the streetlamps filtered into the darkened building, casting a ghostly hue on the items in the shop.

Without even being able to see much of it, the old building gave Jed a brief feeling of comfort. He felt like he was in one of the ancient buildings on his family’s farm back on Earth. Everything in the building was old—and for Jed, strangely, it was the first time he’d felt safe since he’d left the Amish Zone back home. Here he was on a planet in a completely different solar system, and everything around him looked vaguely familiar.

Pook pulled some heavy blanket curtains down over the glass windows in the storefront, leaving them in almost perfect darkness. Then he walked through the store, and as he did he paused occasionally to light some fuel-burning lanterns that hung from wrought-iron hooks throughout the building. Jed couldn’t say what kind of fuel the lanterns burned, but in his melancholic reverie he could swear that it smelled just like kerosene. A golden glow flooded the store as Pook lit the last lantern.

“A lot of this stuff might look really familiar to you, Jed,” Pook said, almost as if he sensed what Jed was feeling. “We buy a lot of old junk on our regular trips to the Amish Zone. People in the City like Amish stuff for some reason. They’ll hang just about anything Amish on their walls. I sold a six-inch piece of rope the other day for a thousand unis.” He shook his head and let out a little giggle. “Of course, now that unis are worthless, maybe I was the one who got the short end of that deal. Seemed good for me at the time, though.”

“The paperwork?” Dawn asked. To Jed, Dawn now seemed like she was in a hurry. Like she had somewhere else to be.

“You have a date, cousin?” Pook asked.

“I… I just don’t like hanging around in here,” she replied. “It gives me the creeps. This is all great stuff, and it was super when it was in someone’s home, but in here it seems almost sacrilegious. Being here in this city and separated from the people who loved it and who owned it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just weird.”

“I don’t think you’re weird,” Jed said. “I love this place, but I don’t think you’re weird.”

“I do,” Pook said, laughing. “Okay, the paperwork. Follow me.”

He made his way through the narrow walkways between mountains of antique furniture, carpets, tools, and household goods. When he got to the back of the store, he reached through the flickering shadows, and on the far wall his hands found an old, whitewashed frame that looked like it had once been a window. He placed the window down on a dusty tan sofa; attached to the back of the frame was an envelope stuffed with papers.

“Here they are,” Pook said.

Pook, Jerry, and Dawn walked back toward the front of the store, but Jed couldn’t move. He was staring at the window frame…

The bottom-right pane of glass was missing. In its place was a piece of metal, a section of an old coffee can. You could see that the can had once—long, long ago—been red with white print, the old-timey kind, stomped flat and cut to fit.

The window itself looked ancient, as it always had, but now the piece of metal coffee can looked ancient, too—maybe over a hundred years old. Jed stared at the old window and touched the replacement pane with his hand.

He could almost feel the years pulse through the cool of the metal as the coffee can stared at him, penetrating him with an ageless accusation.