Alice helped Audrey write her speech, all the while saying that Marley would have done a better job. Whether that was true or not, Alice proved more than up to the challenge. Audrey herself could write a perfectly decent field report or interoffice memo but had no special gift for words.
They recorded the speech as soon as possible, late on the afternoon of the day they fled the Sakura Grill. Alice brought Audrey a conservative, off-white dress to wear and showed up with a human hairdresser, which Audrey found unnecessary and uncomfortable—but then, Alice had worked in streaming entertainment. Audrey should probably be grateful she didn’t have a massive American flag waving in the breeze behind her or a choir of earnest children. That said, Audrey wouldn’t be there for the editing. Maybe they’d add the flag and the children later.
She spoke from behind a podium on the stage of a high school that wasn’t yet open for the new school year.
“My name is Audrey Adams. I’ve served the United States as an intelligence analyst and sometimes a field agent for the past fourteen years ... although after this message, I assume I’ll be fired.
“I was the field coordinator for a covert mission we conducted on Cascadian soil. During this mission, we compromised Cascadia’s Citizen Dividend system and diverted money from the Cascadian government to a number of unwitting Cascadians. We wanted to create the appearance of massive fraud within the Citizen Dividend system, but our audience was not Cascadia: it was you, my fellow American citizens. Some of my superiors believed that unrest in the American public over the lack of jobs and the treatment of unemployed Americans could be quieted, or that you could be distracted from it, if we could make you believe that the Cascadian system was corrupt.
“My official, non-intelligence work for many years has been trying to help unemployed Americans find new work, but the reality we must face is that the world has changed. There aren’t jobs for everyone anymore. In America, that’s a catastrophe, because in America, you’re told that without a job, you’re worthless. In America, you’re told that not having a job is your own fault for not trying hard enough—for not being enough. In America, you’re told everyone has the same opportunity and is responsible for their own success.
“But how can we all have the same opportunity if some of us start life with little or nothing to our names and can only make money through paying work, which is scarcer every year, while others start life with vast reserves of wealth, more than they will ever need for their comfort and well-being? When one American’s honest job disappears because a robot can do it, whoever had the money to buy that robot gets all of the financial benefit.
“Cascadia does not have a perfect system. However, the Cascadian Citizen Dividend is a different solution to the same problem, a solution that takes much of the wealth that is generated by automation in our society and distributes it. While that solution might or might not be right for America, it should be up to regular Americans to decide. That’s not what’s happening. Instead, some of the wealthiest and most powerful in America are fighting a war at home, a war of information, trying to make you think that the Cascadian system is hopeless and corrupt so that you will continue to put up with the poverty and degradation these wealthy power brokers are forcing on you and other Americans.
“I am ashamed of my part in trying to force this lie on you. I did it with the best of intentions. I thought I was trying to prevent a war. What I didn’t realize was that the same wealthy string-pullers who came up with this scheme were planning a war with Cascadia that they would start regardless of how my operation went. I discovered only recently that they’ve been preparing for this war and sending drones into Cascadian territory for months, and possibly for years.
“Good intentions are no excuse for harming the people I should have been helping to protect. I’m sorry for being part of this hoax, and I’m sorry I didn’t see through these lies sooner.
“Of the many people who have forced first poverty and now war on you, I would like to introduce you to one in particular: Tyler Godbout. As a citizen of the Mountain Republic, he betrayed what was then his country in exchange for favors from our own government. More recently, he was in charge of the fraud I spoke of, in which we sabotaged the Cascadian Citizen Dividend system in an attempt to keep American citizens pacified. But his motives weren’t just to manipulate American opinion: it turns out he was also engineering personal gain. He attempted to use our sabotage in Cascadia to frame Cascadian citizens who owned assets he wanted to acquire. If he’d been successful, he would have been able to buy many of those assets at far below their real worth, while their owners would have been treated as criminals.
“Tyler Godbout isn’t the only wealthy and powerful person in our government who needs to be brought to account. I urge you to seek out him and the others and make them answer for what they’ve done. As for me, I will be negotiating my return to the United States, where I will turn myself in to await justice. I’m concerned that justice may not be what’s waiting for me, because I realize now that many of the most powerful in our government don’t much care for life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness. Instead, they’re obsessed with amassing more and more and always more wealth and influence.
“Attached to this broadcast, you will find several hundred documents with details of some of the criminal behavior I’ve just described. I hope you will make good use of them and take America forward into an era of greater justice, greater compassion, and greater integrity.
“Thank you for listening, and may we all come out of this present crisis safely and with renewed resolve.”
Tracey and Pez, along with some other Louvre specialists, Audrey was told, hacked an American severe weather warning network and used it to push Audrey’s speech as an urgent bulletin to every American with a pair of lenses. They also hijacked thirteen popular streaming channels and broadcast the speech on each of those on a loop. Within half an hour, most American adults had seen the speech, or at least heard a summary of it.
Audrey had reversed her priorities, she realized. She’d counted for years on her ability to be ignored, and now here she was, voluntarily being, for the moment, the most noticeable human being in both America and Cascadia. She had a hard time imagining anything more unpleasant.
The Louvre arranged for a self-driving car to bring Audrey to a train station, where she boarded train to the American border. There, the FBI would take her into custody. She waited until she had locked herself into her tiny, private compartment on the train before contacting Noah. He’d sent her two messages since her speech, both short. One thanked her for having the courage to stand up and speak. In the other, he asked if she was sure going back to America was the best option.
From what Audrey could see, it was the only good option. Some American social media personalities were claiming she’d been captured by Cascadians and forced to “confess” at gunpoint, or that she’d been brainwashed, or that she was a fraud who wasn’t even from America. Going back was the best way to respond to all of that.
The Cascadian government, which by rights should have tried to find and arrest her as soon as she released the speech, seemed lackadaisical about pursuing her, though she received a few notifications from the CBI that made it clear they expected her to follow through with her plan to go back. Probably the Cascadians realized she was more valuable back in America than serving time in a Cascadian restorative justice program.
Even if she didn’t seriously consider other alternatives, returning to the U.S. petrified her. American prisons had never been great, but in recent years, they had become massively overcrowded, and it seemed as though every month, a scandal surfaced about a different private prison company’s negligence or abuse of prisoners.
As bad as prison would be, a worse possibility was that someone upset by her speech would step out of a crowd and shoot her down with a one hundred percent legal, computer-targeted handgun.
Alternatively, she might be hailed as a brave patriot, exonerated, and sent into happy retirement with a generous pension ... or maybe the heavens would open up and transport her to Heaven in a beam of golden light. The two possibilities seemed equally likely.
As the train accelerated to traveling speed, she took a deep breath and typed out a command to voice call Noah. The icon went dim and bright, dim and bright, waiting for him to pick up. She was just reaching forward to disconnect when he picked up.
“Audrey,” he said.
“Hi. I’m on a train back to America.”
“I hope you enjoyed your visit,” he said.
“Is that supposed to be funny?” she said. “I may have lost my ability to tell.”
“Do you think you’ll be back?”
“I don’t know. They might hang me in the town square. If so, no.”
“What if they don’t hang you in the town square?”
“Are you angling for another date?”
“I don’t know if we should have any more dates,” Noah said. “Every time we do, there’s a war.”
“The first one was nice, though.”
“True. Audrey, I don’t want you to think I’m ... I’m not necessarily ... I don’t know if I’m anything more than a supportive acquaintance anymore.”
“That’s fine. I’m not expecting conjugal visits.”
“You’re an unusually plain-spoken person, Audrey.”
“So they tell me. I got the impression you liked that about me.”
“Well, I do. You know, Audrey ...”
She waited, but he didn’t finish the sentence.
“What?” she said.
“Nothing. I just ... Take care of yourself. Try not to get lined up against any walls. Don’t lose hope. There are a lot of people in your corner.”
“Even if they’re not on my side,” Audrey said.
“I don’t know,” Noah said. “I think at this point, they’re mostly on your side, too.”
Audrey gave him another few moments. When he didn’t have anything to add, she disconnected.
She leaned against the window and wished Matilda were there, maybe in a carrier on the seat beside her. She could have poked her fingers through the mesh to touch the cat’s fur. Elena had agreed to get Matilda from Noah and take care of her while Audrey was, as they had put it when talking together, “away.” That had surely been the right decision. Even so, Matilda had been the one constant in Audrey’s life for the last eleven years. Now, there was nothing familiar left.
She lay her forehead against the glass, watching the yellowing landscape flicker by, waiting for nothing, returning home.