A N Y O N E Y O U K N O W ? He was on the floor of his bedroom looking for bugs when the police arrived. The possibility that the two events might be connected found no room in his mind to roost amidst the splintering thunderclap of the kicked-in door and the cold biting steel of the handcuffs. Ridley lay there wheezing into the carpet while one of the unseen officers spouted out mirandas. He could feel the pressure of a baton jammed into the small of his back while the monotonous voice droned on and on, and he shifted uncomfortably. A suspicious wiry glint caught his eye from under the bed, and he squinted determinedly, trying to make out its shape amidst the shadows. Abruptly he was hauled to his feet by the short chain between his wrists, hauled into the bright unshaded daylight that made him stumble blindly into the soiled vinyl back seat of the police car. They never told him the charge. All about him people were cursing and moping and yelling, a milling crowd of unshaven drunks and torn vagrants. He sighed, tried to block them out as he waited to be booked. Beside him a man in fatiques screamed relentlessly, flinging invisible serpents from his shoulders. Ridley stared at a spider moving mechanically up the joint of two walls, its thin bent legs working in the methodic drive of the insect world. He didn't hear his name called, such was his distraction; an officer had to come and haul him to the counter. He kept his toes on the line and tried to look defiantly accomodating. "Jameson Scott," the uniformed attendant behind the counter began, "No." She looked up at Ridley's interruption. "Ridley Barret." Her nametag said Angela. The attendant looked distractedly at her papers. "4422 Acacia Ave?" She questioned. He nodded. "And your name is not Jameson Scott?" He nodded once again. "I.D., please." He dug his wallet out of his back jeans pocket, fished out his social security card and his driver's license, threw down a Mastercard for good measure. "Angela" disappeared into a busy back room with the cards, making him regret the whim of the credit card. She returned a few minutes later and returned his I.D.--all photocopied, undoubtedly--along with an ink pad and a print card. "Prints, please." He complied grudgingly, blueing his fingers with the special dry-ink that was supposed to brush off but that always seemed to stain, and Angela disappeared with the results. He stood at the crowded booking room counter for a good fifteen minutes, smelling sweat and urine, hearing threats and bribes, before she returned. "This is an acknowledgement of bad service," she began, sliding a sheet of paper towards him, "And this is a waiver of responsibility for the search warrant." She pushed over another sheaf of papers and a pen. "Sign here," she said, indicating with her index finger. "Here, and here. Initial here, here, and here. Date here and here. And sign here." He did as she ordered and slid the ream of paper back towards her. "You forgot an initial," she informed him disinterestedly. "No I didn't." "Right here." Angela indicated a small line captioned "Initials". "You didn't tell me about that one," he defended, signing. She just looked at him. He gave her back the pen, dismissed the argument. Angela tore off the white, pink, yellow, and green copies, gave him the blue and the grey. "Turn the blue in at the front desk, keep the grey for your records." "What records?" He asked, wondering if the I.R.S. would audit false arrests. She wandered off without a word, "Hey," he called half-heartedly. Angela turned back, eyes half-angry and all impatient. What would she do if I asked her out, he wondered. "What about my door?" He asked. She blinked. "They kicked in my door," Ridley explained. "It needs to be repaired." Angela turned fully, resignedly, and withdrew a new set of forms from beneath the counter. There better be a shelf there, Ridley thought to himself. Not that he would ever know. "This is a motion to file limited civil suit," she began robotically. "This is to surrender your right to an attorney in exchange for a default compensation ruling. And this is an expenses request form." "Don't you guys fill those out?" He asked, at first joking, now irritated. Before he left the counter he had signed his name sixteen times, initialled another twenty, detailed his home address at least four, and written his social security number more times than any "I will not..." line from detention in his grammar school days. "Thank you," she said tonelessly to his receding back. The police officers eyed him suspiciously. He had flashed the blue slip at the fortified front desk and was outside, home free, wondering in fact how he was going to get home. Behind him he heard a commotion, which was not unusual, and four rapid gunshots, which was. A wild-eyed man rolled down the concrete steps in a limp heap, lips quivering and eyes imploring, a small plastic box slipping from his grasp and scraping along the pavement. Ridley picked it up and continued walking as if nothing had happened. It was an 8mm video cassette. By the time the officers had searched their victim Ridley was halfway home. "Check it out," Val said, pointing. Ridley looked up at the TV screen of the small cafe where they were eating. Two figures sat at an oak table, one in tan fatigues with a black beret and the other in a navy-blue suit with a power tie, the vestigal forms of their aides milling about indistinctly. "The president and prime minister Jahad, finally signing the treaty. No more terrorism." "Why?" Ridley asked plainly, fingering a french fry. "What do you mean?" His friend looked puzzled. "What's in it for Jahad? We'll never be able to effectively counter their methods." He paused, considered. "What's in it for President Conner? The American people will be crying for blood." He shook his head. "I don't get it." Val shrugged. "Can't hear the newscast from here, but they wouldn't detail the treaty anyways. They just want us to know that it's happening." Exactly, thought Ridley. "Must be something awfully good, though," Val continued. "Else they wouldn't be doing it, right?" "Right," Ridley replied. He had to agree; the one given that he had uncovered in life was self-interest. He ate his Teriyaki burger silently. "You never know," came the conversation from an adjoining table, filling the silence. "You might be a cop, on the Other Side." Val smiled. "So what do you think you'd be, on the Other Side?" Ridley gave a silent jerk of derisive laughter, the everyman's way of responding to theology. "Kinda random isn't it? I mean, it's retribution and all, but no-one knows what actually constitutes a crime, so to speak." "A sin," Val corrected. "Whatever." "So what do you think you'd end up as?" His friend pressed. Ridley paused in consideration. "A teacher," he mentioned vaguely, then nodded his head in confirmation. Val winced. "Harsh." "What about you?" "I dunno." Val looked at the TV set, now portraying the synthetic dangers of a retiring athlete's career. "An exec, I guess. Maybe even a politician." "Christ," Ridley smiled. "What'd you do?" Val just smiled. Ridley had taken up where he left off. He was on his hands and knees, scuttling along the carpet, scrutinizing his house for antennae and circuitry. The compact videocassette rested unobtrus- ively on his dresser. A twitch of motion caught his eye. He glanced over to his left, saw a black beetle-like creature crawling along his carpet, towards him. Without thinking he squashed it with the edge of his palm. He started to wipe his hand on his jeans, then stopped. There was nothing there; no ichor on his flesh, no spare legs or bits of wing. Disconcerted, he looked back at the carpet. There lay the beetle, crushed but not bleeding or messy. He crawled over, peered closely at the remains. Instead of twitching limbs and yellowed internals, he saw there amidst the deep beige forest of the carpet a scattering of plastic struts and gears, a complex motor assembly under the torn resin shell of the beetle. An inorganic. A fake. A bug. Ridley sat back shaking. He said nothing, did nothing for a long time; merely tried to catch his breath. Fake. Metal. Plastic. Machine. Without a word he drew a pocketknife from his jeans, unfolded a blade, sliced the back of his palm without so much as a breath of surprise. Blood flowed; red, real blood, amidst the papery flesh and the tiny torn strings of muscle. He breathed a shallow sigh of relief and leaned against the wall, letting his hand take care of itself. I have a bug problem, he realized, that no Orkin Man can fix. So he would have to leave. He glanced up at the video- cassette. If nothing else, to avoid being caught with the dead man's footage. It suddenly struck him that he had not yet viewed it; he lacked a camcorder in which to play it. Ridley stood, his mind made up. The cassette was slipped into a coat pocket, his clothes were checked for more miniscule monitoring devices, and he was on his way. There were no cars on his street. He spun the wheel sedately, not too worried; it was, after all in the middle of the average 9 to 5 work shift. By the time he made it to Olympic he was curious: nothing but parked cars all the way. Not a pedestrian or a motorist in sight. Is there something I forgot about, he wondered as he drove at a don't-stop-me 35, some holiday or a parade or a war or something? He turned onto 4th street, heading towards Sears, and instantly ran into traffic. Lots of traffic, as if every car that he should have seen on the way to 4th street was here now, going exactly where he was going. What is this, Ridley wondered helplessly as he sat in an unplanned linear parking lot. What did I do? He sat in the glass box of his car until he could almost smell himself cooking in the mid-morning sun, then rolled down a window, one elbow extending into the steaming air. The exhaust of the cars that trapped him, that were trapped with him by the ponderous wills of fate and traffic, rolled into his lungs, smothering him worse than the air in his apartment. Five blocks to the store, he thought miserably. And he hit every light on the way. Ridley cringed habitually, half-ducked as he drove past the cop and into the parking lot. He won't bother me, the frantic thought came, If he thinks I'm a Consumer. The idea relaxed him slightly, and he sounded the maze of the parking lot with relative ease. A pair of two-dollar sunglasses guarded his eyes as he braved the open air en route to the electronics department. He managed to isolate himself in a corner of the video department with a handcam before anyone noticed, and with the salesmen busy he could expect at least ten minutes to himself. He slammed the 8mm cartridge home and raised the camcorder so he could see the tiny square display in the eyepiece. It took him all of a quarter-second to recognize scene the scene from the newscast; the figures of President Connor and Prime Minister Jahad were seated at the table, conversing in the same clipped, restrained manner. He pressed the rubber receptacle further against his eye and peered intently as Conner stuttered and lifted his head up. Ridley stood, transfixed, and stared at the mute display as the negotiation was interrupted like a common film scene. A tall, dark-haired man stepped forward quickly to gesture and explain to the two political figures, coaching them as if on acting. The man nodded, disappeared, and the scene was run through again, from the top, this time occurring exactly as the newscast had. Ridley watched the small figures with straining eyes as Connor and Jahad stood up, laughing and shaking hands, then heading jovially over to a porta-fridge to share a six-pack. "Anything I can help you with, sir?" Ridley turned around to gaze into the forehead of a blonde, eagerly intent salesman. He shook his head. "No, I'm ok." And started to turn back to the film. "Can I get that for you, sir?" The salesman asked, reaching for the camcorder with delicate fingers. Ridley shrugged and surrendered the device, pausing to eject his tape. The salesman looked at him quizzically. "Just checking out the image," Ridley explained, holding the tape up to show that it did not belong to the store. "And how'd you find it?" pressed the salesman. Christ, thought Ridley. Who does this guy work for? "A little fuzzy," he replied, chagrined. "But this was a home recording." "We may have something that will clear that up for you, sir," the salesman invited with a gleam of teeth that would have made a shark nervous. "If you'll just step this way..." "Certainly," Ridley replied, following the man's pale blue shirt. He slipped one hand to his watch and surreptitiously set of the alarm. He stopped in his tracks, mimed looking at his watch in confusion. The salesman looked back at him in dawning apprehension. "I gotta go," Ridley explained hastily. "My lunch is almost up." The salesman started to look forlorn, so he added, "But which model were you going to show me?" He faked enough interest to promise a future sale before he fled, pleading an abominable schedule. They were onto him before he reached his car. He glanced to his left, saw three dark-suited men in shades heading towards him, briefcases swinging in tandem. He glanced to the right, saw three more heading for him at an angle slightly more acute. Raising his head, he saw four men heading for his car, all dressed in identical indigo suits. Overhead flew a black insectoid helicopter. Ridley broke to the right, pivoted to run back towards the store. At the main entrance he saw two nonchalant men who were obviously store security conferring with a charcoal-suited, grey-haired man. With a grunted curse he jerked his course to the left, heading for the chainlink fence that prevented cars from accidentally plummeting to the freeway below. He hit the fence at a dead run, the loose metal weave shaking with his momentum as he clawed his way to the clattering top. For a brief second, balanced atop the fence as he gingerly crossed the barbed-wire ballcatchers, Ridley glanced back and saw a significant number of dark-suited men racing across the parking lot towards him. Half of them were drawing weapons; the other half were talking to their watches. He sighed, lidded his eyes, and dropped into the maesltrom of roaring noise, whipping air, and stinging exhaust. The shock of the two-story drop was still numbing his knees with tingling fingers when he rose in a sprint, feet pounding on a stretch of blacktop littered with glass and gravel. He dodged abandoned bumpers and half-finished beer cans as he ran along next to the river of steel, cars honking and drivers yelling for him to get the hell back to a sidewalk. Ridley ignored them and kept running, jolts of pain shooting up his legs from the drop, heading for the Clausen Tunnel a few hundred yards away. Ridley was still coughing from the lung-burning exhaust, deaf from the echoing thunder of cars, and limping from the jump when he emerged from the tunnel. He scrabbled up the embankment quickly, feet sliding amidst the dry dirt and dead underbrush. He paused when he reached the street level, gasping for air and watching the cop cars flash by in smears of red and blue. They were after him this time, no mistake; he bolted for cover and proceeded to lose himself amidst the maze of alleys and parking structures that littered downtown. When he ran out of strength and collapsed against a brick wall in an alley he had never before seen, panting in the rotten air, there was not a single cop car in sight. In fact, there was no one in sight; the alley was deserted, with no traffic passing on the streets at either end. An odd stillness descended upon him, a tranquility drawn partly from the dead silence that hung ghostily in the air, and partly from the relief he felt at his escape. Ridley raised his hung head as his breath began to come back. Standing at the edge of the alley, quiet and still, he saw a tall man in a black trench coat, the grey sky sweeping off his sunglasses. The man approached him slowly, and as Ridley began to recognize his features he backed away, too tired to run, until he fall amidst a clattering tumult of falling garbage cans. The black, shadowy figure loomed over him with all the implied menace of a silent-film villain. "I believe," the dark-haired man from the video began, "That you should be coming with me." "You're probably feeling some slight pain in your neck," the same voice informed him countless hours later, when he had been imprisoned sleeplessly in the dark for so long that he no longer knew how old he was. "The necessity to keep your metabolism clean for the next few days ruled out the use of any painkillers." Ridley shrugged, looked about the sparse white room with its conference table and two chairs, rubbed his neck unconsciously. "You are probably unaware of the operation performed yesterday afternoon," the tall man continued. "But undoubtedly you are aware of the existence of subdermal implants--such as Norplant, and the stimulant glands we graft into our special forces troops." He stopped pacing and met Ridley's gaze. "What you have is a mild euphoric with inhibitory side effects; essentially, a subdermal Prozac plant." Ridley's breath caught in his throat; his spirit plummeted to depths hitherto unknown to mankind. "It's our little way of dealing with dissent here; we consider it far more humane than murder." More humane my ass, Ridley thought sourly. I've been damned to happiness. "In short, within thirty hours you will be utterly and completely care-free, and will be allowed to return home where you can resume your life to a certain extent. I should warn you, however, that your life will be anything but the same. Whatever knowledge you possess, whatever you learn or find, will not concern you; in fact, you will find it difficult--if not impossible--to focus your attention on a single idea for more than a few minutes. You may not be a philosopher but you will," and here his voice provided some slight emphasis, "Be content. Any questions?" Ridley was too shocked to actually debate the process or his future; he faced his damnation like a naked blade. One thought had burned itself into his mind during his captivity, and now he gave it voice. "Are you the one who really runs this country?" The tall man laughed. "What country?" "America," Ridley snapped. "Do you represent the real power here, the hidden government?" "America," the dark man replied. "Has ceased to exist. All that remains now is capitalism, a group of people who act purely on self-interest. Hardly a nation at all. "When's the last time you ever voted?" the man continued by way of illustration. "More to the point, do you even know anyone who votes? Democracy no longer exists; politicians are entertainers only, like athletes, with each victory scripted months before it can even be attempted to be achieved. "The nation no longer exists; do you seriously think anyone living here now would defend you simply because you're American? Chances are they wouldn't even speak to you. And no-one dies for America any more; they die for their paychecks, for their lifestyle, for the eighty-six channels of light-hearted drama we provide them with. America is only an audience, Mr. Barret; an audience that buys tickets and popcorn and T-shirts and cares only for the right to buy more tickets and popcorn and T-shirts. All of America is but an audience," he concluded, pausing in his pacing to clap Ridley on the shoulder. "And you're one of them." He left the room with what might have been described as a wry smile. They dropped Ridley off at his home, and he thanked them, shaking each of their hands in turn while they nodded politely from behind mirrored sunglasses. As they drove away he turned to gaze at his apartment, the No Fear shirt they had given him flapping gently in the breeze, the birdcalls that fell from telephone wires reminding him of the dance-mix songs that had been playing on the radio. Out of habit he glanced at his watch, then hurried towards his apartment with a quick frown, late for his favorite show.