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| panda-like calm through fiction | |||||||||
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Behāv
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Ehud did not belong here; to be precise, Ehud did not belong now. But a message that seemed to come from Allah had told him in 1999 to go into Cryostasis. That technology should not have existed then, but Allah whispered its secrets into the ears of other men, and soon, Ehud was deep in a cold sleep. He awoke in what seemed like a dream. A man who spoke with the voice of Allah requested he aid in jihad against the infidels. In that dream he said yes.
And then he found more dreams, a world so much different from the one he’d left. Allah’s Voice had explained why he had been chosen so many years ago. Muslims had been leashed; every person on the planet had been implanted with BehāvMod, which warned others of potentially dangerous behavior and thoughts. The BehāvMod chip was part of a suite of technologies that modern humans were implanted with, including cellular communications, health monitors, wifi; virtually all transactions used a transponder located in the hand marketed as PayPalm. Even in the remotest parts of the world it was impossible to work or buy food without some form of this technology. But Ehud did not bear its taint; he was still a pure Muslim. The Voice explained that he would bring luggage, and use a ticket they had purchased in the name of his new false identity, that they had learned from mistakes of years past. The explosive device was hidden on his person, but its location was uncomfortable, and made him walk as if one leg was a few inches taller. And that was when he saw it. It flashed across a screen between toothpaste advertisements, in the red of blood, an image of the Prophet. His heard raced; had the infidels broken the law of his faith and shown images of the Prophet, or had Allah revealed the Prophet to him, encouragement for the sacrifice he intended to make? In the ticket line, he spoke with a woman who was terse, but seemed to want to be friendly. She asked irrelevant questions, and Ehud realized he was sweating profusely. Then she asked, “Are you carrying any explosive devices in your luggage or on your person?” Ehud stopped, and blinked at her. He did not believe he’d heard the question correctly. He was trying to figure out a way to ask her to repeat it that didn’t sound like he was avoiding the question when she said it again, and he was as taken aback now, knowing that he had not misheard her. “No, no.” She smiled, and sent him through. Immediately passed her desk he was met by a line of security. The man in front was older but large and muscular; the men behind him were armed and armored like soldiers. “I need you to come with me, sir.” “My name is-” “No, it isn’t. But that’s part of what we’re going to talk to you about.” The man took him into a small room. It had a single camera in the corner, and a monitor on a cart. Beyond that, there was a table and two chairs, and Ehud was pointed towards one of them. The other man walked over and dropped into his own. “Let me explain why we pulled you out of line. That image of Mohammed, yeah, you didn’t dream that, but your reaction, fear, excitement, a little bit of rage, that lit you up like a Christmas tree on our scanners; Israelis who designed that little system have your number. All that meant is we’d talk to you, put you through the more vigorous exams. Hell, even some of the tranquil Muslims get pissed off if they think we’re incorporating Mo into our interior decorating- or we could be getting blowback from you having a fight with your wife. But call it strike one.” “Then you walked up to the ticket line. They asked the standard bio information, age, home address, the shit I’m sure you memorized. Then they ask a few of the curveball questions, what kind of fruit you’d be, your favorite local sports team, happiest moment. And you lied your balls off. Bioscanners nearly passed a stone measuring all the creative tap-dancing and stress you put your poor head through. Strike two.” “Now this, I’m still all kinds of excited about this one, so much I had them wheel a monitor into the room. Now, according to your ID, you’re from Ghana, with a Congolese mother. Database points to a largely pure ethnographic line from those two sources, going back as far as records, anyway. But look what the Profiler says; you see all that red flashing across the screen? That is you physically deviating from the mean you’d expect to see from that lineage. That green, now, is you matching up, with an error rate in the hundreds part of the decimal point, to a Nigerian origin. Goddamn, I love science. We also pulled a family record, put you up against profile pictures, and you look nothing like anyone in the family, again, going back as far as we have records. What that all means is strike three.” “Of course, you were on our radar the moment you walked in our door. See, according to the BehāvMod system you don’t exist. That raises a bigger red flag than someone walking around with an illegal tech mod; that just usually means you’re a junky or a chimo looking to get his rocks off brushing by kiddies at the luggage wheel. Beyond that, you’re mumbling to yourself in a thirty-year-old dialect; what that usually means is that somebody learned a language late to lie about who they are from a crap secondary source.” “But everything about you is outmoded, grooming, clothing, hair, down to your ridiculous ass-explosives; yeah, the sniffer managed to find those even past your smelly colon. Now let me peer into my crystal ball: trigger is an altimeter, similar to the one built into your watch; just as you were approaching whatever the ceiling was, you were to go to the shitter and drop the bomb in the lavatory. Once the bomb was outside of your body cavity where it wouldn’t be muffled by you, you’re free to sit back and count your virgins. Sound about right?” “You have the time? Of course you don’t. We EMPed you as the went through that door. Your watch and whatever passed for a detonator are caput.” Ehud blinked stupidly at the man; he could not believe Allah had forsaken him so completely. “So what year are you back from? Unfortunately, you’re not the first of these ridiculous time bombers. So what year did they put you on ice?” Ehud’s eyes dropped to the table. “Nineteen ninety nine.” “You know what depresses me the most? Al Qaeda have apparently figured out how to send messages back in time, but the most constructive thing those fucktards can think to do with it is more half-baked terrorist plots. I’ve been saying it since that underpants bomber asshole, that that’s what all of you terrorist shits deserve: to have your balls roasted. Poetic justice, that every time you grope yourself all you feel is am overcooked tofu dog. It is a goddamned travesty that the bill of rights prevents me from kicking the shit out of you for trying to murder a few hundred people.” “Bomb techs will be here in another minute to disarm your anus. Sniffer puts it at about a pound of plastique in your colon, about the equivalent of an angry con giving it to you in the prison yard, all for this jihad nonsense. I’ve never been big into religion, but nobody’s God is that big an asshole.” |
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