GUNSLINGER GIRL
"Next-Gen"
By
Robert Frazer
"The only way to get rid of responsibilities is to discharge them."
-Walter S. Robinson.
When he was fourteen, Benito Zinanni had spent a long and flustered afternoon squirming and fidgeting in a baking and stuffy tailor's, and then spent the evening feeling the starch scraping and the pins biting at a rather fancy do. His father was a grocer – well, supermarket manager, but there was an aisle for fruit & veg – but in his particular comune (first mentioned in monastic tithe records in 1178, doantcherno) that meant that he was a member of the Ancient, Loyal And Worshipful Company Of Costermongers.
Yes, even the barrow-boys had their own union.
Anyway, constituents of that venerable institution, subsumed and diffused into the supporting skein of urban life, were accorded the privilege of an invitation to an annual gathering celebrating the pillars of Italy's unique civic spirit, one that had preserved progress and society when the rest of muddy Europe was awash with unshaved barbarians. That year the honour had been bestowed on Mr. Zinanni – and his heir and successor to the worthy and honourable trade – to represent the Company at the celebration.
There was another dinner later in the year where they didn't have to drag their brats along, but Zinanni, purveyor of convenient sundries, never got invited to that one.
They had been shown in to a very long table, in a very long room. Zinanni pere and his son Benito had drifted to a place around about the middle of the table, only for a pleasantly-smiling man with long tails to his jacket to appear and, very politely, direct them to a pair of seats further towards the end. The far end, away from the expensive portraits in knobbly frames, and closer to the door.
That had been the young Master Zinanni's first introduction to the concept of precedence.
Apparently, the Ancient, Loyal And Worshipful Company Of Costermongers ranked below the Marches Guild Of Dentists And Orthodontists, although they did come in above the League of Traditional Tanners. There was a list of all the various attending unions, guilds, and societies printed on a card but made to look like loopy handwriting – Benito had thought that he'd been looking at a menu and was wondering if 'cobblers' was supposed to be a cuisinaire's name for a type of steak. This piece of stiff paper determined the company you kept (the man from the Maceratan Suppliers' Federation opposite him brayed noisily throughout the evening), the eminence accorded to you (the waiters walked past the backs of the Zinnanis to serve others higher up the table first), and your position along the table, with those accorded greater precedence brought closer to the figure at its head, a duke of somewhere who everyone called "Your Grace" (although only with a certain light glint in their eyes).
It had annoyed Benito then – all of the standing up and sitting down and practising of the gainful and illuminating art of conversation with his left-hand neighbour during the first course and his right-hand neighbour during the main meant that he had to wait ages to get fed, and the food was too rich to do more than pick at anyway (although he enjoyed saying "cin cin" at the blessing, as it meant he could drink the wine afterwards, he had to give them that). Still, that evening became one of the many aspects of the adult world revealed to him as he advanced past the years of adolescence, dropping in front of his eyes like lenses at the opticians', each discrete addition altering his perspective – and feeling uncomfortable on his face at the same time. Once Benito had seen it there, he saw it everywhere – what had once passed over his notice as simply people milling about suddenly crystallised into set schemes, that same shuffling about to establish a pecking order that happened subconsciously, as inescapably as the molecular packing they touched on in chemistry lab - between cliques at school, between the members of the cliques at school, between towns and cities, between nations on the map and tribes and parties and immigrant communities and pressure groups and activists...
...and also, it had rapidly become apparent, within Section One, Public Safety, of the Social Welfare Agency.
Section One's analytical staff was housed in a bright and airy open-plan office that was a former ballroom, and still had plaster friezes around its light fittings. The new intake, though, along those who had yet to elucidate any profound breakthrough in a target's movements and motivations, and those assigned to work in the Public Front during the Agency's open days, were relegated to a set of poky, irregular offices that looked as though they were made by clumsily hacking out walls from the old servants' quarters. These had west-facing windows that sweltered as the heat of the afternoon sun was focused through them during the summer, and chilled as they sapped heat out after missing the warmth of the middle of the day during the winter.
Benito Zinanni understood this when he found that he had started taking jumpers into work.
"Will you take that ridiculous thing off?" Toni shook her head pityingly from her own desk on the other side of the room. "You look like some English grandfather." She pulled a face with the sour sting of limes.
"I was thinking of an aristocrat, warm in his fantastic mountain chalet." Benito grunted as he folded shut the storage packet for another phone-tap recording cassette and dropped it into the "OUT" bin on the floor beside his chair. That was quite enough about Timeo Rosso's arguments with the mechanic about his car's leaky hydraulics for one morning.
"Well, one can dream." Toni sighed as she slotted in another cassette tape into her own recorder.
"Dream? I just need to find evidence of Chief Draghi's secret Iranian lovechild and the hush money will have me set for life." Benito frowned at the screen of his workstation as he typed in his signature to the transcript that he had just completed.
Toni gave Benito a motherly smile as she slipped her headphones on.
Benito was just about to make a start on another tape of his own when Clemente got up from his own desk and gave him a tap on the shoulder. "You can warm up with a fresh ski down to the lower slopes, chevalie Bennie." He chortled, tipping his head towards the clock. "Morning break."
There was no service during morning break, as the caterers had barricaded themselves in the kitchen in an attempt to contain the preparation of lunch, but they did leave out a couple of trolleys in the refectory with plates of biscuits (there was always a scramble for the pink wafers and the oatmeal cookies) and coffee urns. Small circles of staff were bobbing up on a murmuring pool of low small-talk and idle shop – the break was chiefly for the benefit of Section One, as the Section Two crew were usually dispersed onto training by this time of day, although they were occasionally joined by a member of Special Operations' support staff who had been laboured with paperwork that day. More than anything else it offered an opportunity to ruminate on and digest the intelligence that they had been examining beforehand.
Benito poured a cup for himself, and then tucked a couple of garibaldis onto the saucer. As he turned away from the trolley, his attention picked up as he noticed someone new entering the refectory. He was tall, broad-shouldered, and had closely-cropped dark hair. He walked in without hesitation, nodded a silent hello to someone who looked at him a little curiously, and made his way straight over to the trolleys. He grabbed the handles of each of the urns in turn to test their weight, and then picked up the fullest before making to leave. At this, someone had the wit to intervene.
"Hey, that's ours!" Benito was a little startled to realise that it was he himself who exclaimed it.
The shout brought the purloining of the coffee urn to the rest of the room's attention, and perplexed glances began to drift over to the trolleys.
The interloper looked puzzled at the attention himself, surprised that what he was doing excited any comment in the first place. "Sorry, but we're in the middle of mission prep."
At this, everyone tensed a little. Christ. A handler. And they had just wanted to enjoy their break.
"Still, don't you have your own coffee?" Benito realised that it was he who was pressing the handler again.
"Actually, no." The handler looked a little irritated at the questioning. He ranged his gaze across the Section One staff surrounding him. "And it's a little impractical to carry five cups halfway across the compound. Besides, you've all filled up already." He nodded at the cup in Benito's hands. "Have a bit of charity, eh?" At this, considering his point to be made, the handler walked out – taking the urn with him.
After a second's pause, a collective shrug rippled through the Section One staff and the conversation rose up again. Realising that his wrist was starting to feel tired from the awkward grip that he had on the saucer, Benito made to set his coffee-cup down on a table, but as he did so, he saw Clemente beckoning him over towards the noticeboard beside the refectory door. Benito grimaced inwardly, took a quick slurp from his drink and chewed through a garibaldi on his way over to his colleague.
"You've got cojones, Zinanni." Clemente laughed.
Benito rolled his eyes. "Just doing my bit for the team. Anyway, what's up?"
Clemente tapped his knuckles against the noticeboard behind him. "Well, seeing as you're keen on putting your head above the parapet, did you take a gander at this?"
A fresh new notice, printed on prominent mustard-yellow paper, had been pinned up. It covered the old notice for the Section Two handlers' Sports Day and Fitness Trials that had already been and gone, and an ad from the compound's groundskeeper, Ramsey, asking if anyone wanted to buy a second-hand lawnmower that the Maintenance department was 'decommissioning'.
On this new notice was a piece of clip art of a cartoon duck preparing to smash up a poor, abused computer monitor with a mallet, and beside it in bold, black print:
ARE YOU A GAMER?
IF YOU HAVE AN EXTENSIVE AND INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE OF VIDEOGAMES
PLEASE MAKE YOURSELF KNOWN TO DR. BELISARIO, S2TD.
INTERNAL LINE: 22478
Benito cocked an eyebrow quizzically. "A little lowbrow for Section Two, isn't it?"
Clemente seemed surprised at his colleague's reaction. "I thought you'd be all over that."
"Why would you think that?" There was an accusatory tone in Benito's voice."
Clemente shrugged. "Well, you like them, don't you?"
"So do most people, it's nothing special." Despite his dismissive words, Benito was sounding defensive.
"Yeah, but still, you're the only one in this whole building that I've seen bringing a magazine in to read during lunch." Clemente pointed out, magnanimously passing over the barb in Benito's inflection.
"It beats Toni's gossip rags, at any rate." Benito gave a hollow laugh, while Clemente smiled indulgently, although Benito couldn't tell at whom.
"You should try it out." Clemente said with certainty. "Who knows, it could be worth some overtime."
"If that's the case, why don't you snag it for yourself, seeing as it caught your eye in the first place?" Benito asked.
Clemente laughed himself this time, although his was lighter than Benito's.
"I'm not brave enough." He said suddenly.
Benito arched his eyebrows at the unexpected remark. He peered at the notice again, then nodded a goodbye to Clemente before heading back over to reclaim his coffee. Someone had pinched his other garibaldi while he'd been talking.
Benito continued to argue about it when they returned to the office.
"It has to be a waste of time. If it's important, why didn't they announce it in the dailies? Or in the standing orders?" Benito waved a hand in an irritable gesture.
Toni shrugged. "Maybe they don't want to embarrass anyone."
"Charming." Benito hissed at the implicit insult. "But if that's the case then all the more reason to ignore it. I don't want to be part of some weird psychology experiment, especially if they're just doing it because they're bored and going to spend the day smirking at me—"
"Look, will you just call the guy already?" Clemente growled from his own desk. "I regret mentioning it now. It's obvious the way you keep going on about it that you want to do it, but you're trying to find excuses not to because you can't accept that anyone would pay attention to that sort of thing in the first place. Well, they are. Just do it - there's half a chance he'll reject you anyway, Section Two are an incestuous bunch."
"Oh, Clemente, can't you just say that they keep to themselves?" Toni sounded a little pained.
"Get it over and done with, Zinanni, and let's get on with the day." Clemente cleared his throat in a show of readjusting his collected composure, and went back to his work.
Benito scowled at the desk telephone as if it was a cruel taskmaster heaping more work on an encumbered man, and revelling in it.
Click.
"Hello, Conditioning Centre."
"Oh! Um... ah – I speak to... to, erm, a 'Doctor Belisario', please?"
"This is he – and you might be?"
"Er, er, I, that is," Benito suddenly felt a flush of fear pit his stomach. "I'm, uh, —benitozinannifromsectionone. And - andisawyouradvertinthemessand-"
"Ah, excellent!" The voice at the other end of the line, quite apart from Benito's bashful inarticulateness, was bright and definite. "Great timing! Are you free right this minute?"
Benito glanced across to the side of the desk with its box messy with cassette tapes and magnetic spools, and then flicked forward to the blank Microsoft Word document on the screen in front of him, with a black blinking line tapping its foot in one corner of the empty white field, impatient for the transcripts to begin.
"Mr. Zinanni? Are you there?"
Benito almost jolted in his seat at the intervention, Belisario's words grabbing him by the scruff of the neck and roughly hauling him back from sinking into the awful pale ocean.
"Well, sorry, Doctor, sir, but, not really." Benito grimaced.
There was a thick bloom of noise in the receiver with what may have been a heavy, tired sigh. "Mr. Zinanni," Belisario began, patiently, "I can tell you right now that you need not fear the perils of advancement in your career as a Section One intelligence officer with your present level of ability in elucidating implications." There was a brief pause, and then Belisario started again. "I would find it a great convenience if you could find a gap in your schedule to accommodate me, and I would be indebted to you for the generous allocation of your attention."
Benito swallowed noisily, his phlegm glucking in his throat like a misshapen lump of rubber. "Uh, yes sir. Absolutely."
"Great!" Belisario's voice rang happily, clear as a bell once more. "Do you know the way to the long range?"
"I think so?" Benito ventured.
"Never mind, go the Guardhouse first, I'll ring through and tell one of the Carabinieri there to escort you. Don't bother signing out of your office, I'll square everything with Chief Draghi later on. See you there."
"Ah, uh, okay…" Benito's mumble into the telephone became lost in the fuzzy morass of a dead burr.
Benito continued to hold the phone receiver to his ear for a moment, contemplatively – he wasn't sure exactly about what, but it seemed an appropriate gesture. He then gingerly lowered it back down, as though the conversation had been an arming sequence for a bomb. The sound of the receiver clacking back onto its hook alerted Toni from her own work across the room, and she glanced over the monitor of her own computer to call across to him. "Any joy?"
Benito glanced away, bouncing off of Toni's inquisitive eye. He chewed the bottom of his lip and drummed his fingers on his desk.
"I think… I'm going to be crossing the border."
A Land Rover with its sides crusted a light brown – meant to be an intrepid off-roader clambering over crags and scoffing at every rut and ridge, but which came across to Benito more like someone who'd failed to bear an invalid with the runs to a place of relief – was hardly Lizzie Windsor waving from the Royal Carriage. Nonetheless, Benito felt quite self-conscious as he rode through the compound in it. Never mind that his driver had had his feet up in the Guardhouse and was watching a grainy daytime chat show on a portable television, and that his bovine lowing of complaints and sluggish reluctance to get up made it seem that delivering Benito to his destination was an onerous put-upon favour as opposed to what he was paid for; Benito was being borne aloft in a palanquin – and his exaltation made him feel like he'd been thrust above the parapet. When the car stopped for the training area gate to open, the Carabiniere pulling it gazed at Benito with idle curiosity – the young man was suddenly flooded with a rush of humiliation, the attention seeming indecent, and physically squirmed in his seat.
Autumn was extending in the training area, but it was less an advancing march across the trees, or even a creeping steal along their branches, than a turgid subsidence at their roots. Sodden leaves, either a saturated dark brown or a drained and strained faint yellow, drooped from their branches like flannels or composted on the ground for trunks and feet to sink into – already the wheels of the Land Rover were hissing slickly through a mulch coating the road. Even though the sun was out, it provided no warmth to counter a breeze that washed the damp of the air against you, nor did the limpid light reflect a sheen off of the moisture coating the ground. The environment slumped past Benito's window like a pea soup half-heartedly stirred – it had motion, but no vitality.
There was a brief moment of relief from the dense – like mud – foliage filling either side of the road when it opened up onto a broad, long, grassy open field… but the Land Rover drove past the range and to a smaller enclosure beside it. It said a lot about the enervating atmosphere seeping into everything around Benito that the Land Rover took off back towards the compound the moment he shut the passenger door behind him – the only thing that could animate someone was further prospect of doing nothing.
Benito found himself on a square of tarmac, covered with patches of leaves like liver spots, that was surrounded by trees on three sides with a wide and low blockhouse of plain red brick along the length of its far edge – the wall was windowless and only an empty gap of a doorframe provided access. There were three vehicles parked up, facing the building – another Carabinieri Land Rover, one of the ubiquitous white Fiat vans that both Sections One and Two frequently used as runabouts, and a Skoda Octavia with a deep purple coat, so much so that it was almost black. There was nowhere there to greet him, but as Benito made his way over to the doorway (trying to avoid splashing his office shoes in the puddles of decomposing leaves), someone did appear – a man with a bald head but a neat and well-kept beard – and wearing a white coat despite the fact that he was nowhere near a laboratory. It looked a little absurd compared to the black jumper, heavy canvas pants and boots that he was wearing underneath it.
"Benito Zinanni?" The figure asked.
"Doctor Belisario?" Benito flicked it back at him.
Belisario nodded. "Very good, we're just about to start." Belisario went back inside the blockhouse, motioning for Benito to follow him.
The building was a shelter for shooters using the range, so one wall was completely open – despite the access for natural light, though, it was still gloomy and it took Benito a moment for his eyes to adjust, taking in each detail in turn. The building was very simple with no furnishings – plain brick walls, a corrugated roof resting on brick pillars, and a hard concrete floor with a patch of artificial grass on each firing step, for a moment giving the shelter the absurd character of a golf driving range. There was a small room off at one end – again without a door – through which Benito could espy the shadows of stacked plywood targets. The shelter was occupied by half a dozen other figures. There was Belisario and two other labcoated companions who introduced themselves as Doctors Donato and Bianchi – Benito knew from his orientation lectures that they were one of the Technology Department's surgeons and the resident psychologist respectively, although he'd never spoken to them personally – and three members of the Agency's Carabinieri security detail, who remained silent. One was squatting down over a weapon cleaning kit laid out on the floor.
The other two were carrying assault rifles.
Benito hurriedly glanced away from the armed men and his gaze took him out onto the range itself. Unlike the neighbouring long range, which stretched out for over a quarter of a mile, this smaller range was no longer than fifty metres. Facing the firing shelter across the space was another brick structure, appearing with an open overhang almost like a miniature version of a spectator's stand at a sports ground, except that where seats would have been was heaped a deep mound of dirty sand into which targets had been stuck. Two steep grass embankments walled in the range, and the ground itself was also grassy, giving it a strangely private, serene atmosphere, almost like a garden itself.
At the half-way twenty-five metre mark, there were more firing steps, flat squares of hardened cement laid down on the grass. Benito was no expert on firearms, but at each step was placed a tool – a series of devices that no-one could mistake as a catalogue of machine guns, each with a magazine fitted or an belt fed in, and a metal box of ammunition open beside them. And standing over one of them... was one of them.
She was a young, adolescent girl, maybe eleven years old, with brown hair braided into two pigtails. She wore mellow clothes of beige and pastel yellow, with a long skirt than ran down to below her knees, with tall white socks which, strangely, fit into a pair of old dirtied trainers. There was a thick black choker around her neck, and a flat expression in her eyes.
Was it bored?
Dismissive?
Vacant?
"That is Donatello." Belisario pointed towards the cyborg.
Not knowing what else to say, Benito fixed upon the one single detail that he could make sense of. "But that's a boy's name... isn't she, uh, it, sorry, a girl – I mean female?"
Bianchi smiled "Yes, she's a girl, Mr. Zinanni. Many of the handlers give their cyborgs boys' names despite that. Fascinating, really."
"Most people call her Dona for short, if that helps." Belisario offered. Before Benito could muster a response Belisario put his hand to his mouth and called out to her. "Okay, Donatello! Now you are free – you may do as you please!"
Dona gave no external sign of acknowledgement, but squatted down on the firing step.
Benito's eyes widened. This was so sudden. "She's not going to—"
Dona picked up the machine gun, easily handling it despite its weight and her small size. She wrapped her arms around it, holding it at the hip, turned her back to the men in the shelter...
The noise was indescribable. The reports smacked Benito full in the face, knocking him reeling – and then boomed off of the back wall of the shelter and walloped him in the back of the head, smashing him forward again. His senses juddered like a punching-bag - Benito was as hopeless as if he'd just been dumped into the ring with a prizefighters, unable to do anything except receive the blows and pray that he'd pass out before too long. Dona blasted out the entire belt fitted into the machine gun in one sustained burst, keeping it tight in against her side despite the weapon shuddering as though it wanted to buck about madly – and one target, depicting the spraypainted stencil of a charging soldier, was reduced to a settling cloud of sawdust and a splintered stump.
"Very good, Donatello! That will be enough for the moment! You can try again very soon!" Belisario called out in an encouraging voice. Dona immediately put down the weapon and stood up again, turned back towards the shelter and remaining still and patient.
Benito was rubbing his ears and hissing in pain, but he suddenly jerked up straight when he saw Dona – he imagined that the cyborg was looking directly at him. With the ice quite vigorously broken, though, he nonetheless found himself inspecting the cyborg in closer detail. This was despite her intimidating presence, which was still communicated despite the distance separating the two, like an ominous background observer in a horror film.
"What's that she's wearing?" Benito pointed to the black lump of plastic, looking like some absurd retro update of a Renaissance ruff, which was wrapped around Dona's neck. "It looks like some sort of collar."
"That's because it is." Belisario shrugged. "A Shock Collar."
Benito's eyes opened wide. "What does that do?" He asked, it almost coming out as a shout.
"Exactly what it says on the tin." Belisario twisted his mouth in a dissatisfied concession. "If things look a bit iffy, we deliver Donatello a squillion volts of Ka-Zap to, aha, persuade her to discontinue the latest venture that she has set her industry to."
Benito turned his expression on Dona, fixated in stark paralysing panic. She was quietly –mechanically – feeding a new belt of ammunition into her weapon. The idea that, without something to keep whipping her on in the right direction, something like that could drift around unbidden, her gaze wandering back, randomly, lazily, idly, dragging the muzzle of her weapon with her—
"I..." Benito swallowed. "I thought that conditioning was all... drugs and hypnosis. Not..."
"Beating them into submission?" Belisario grated out a dry, humourless laugh. "It isn't – I make it a point of pride that it isn't. This gear hasn't been used since the Project Galatea days, before the Agency was even founded - and conditioning wasn't as... sophisticated back then. They've been sitting on a shelf for years."
Benito tightened his jaw. "Years?" He ground out. "That long? Just gathering dust? How do you know that it still functions?" Previously he had felt sad for Dona that she had to endure this – now he felt alarmed for himself that she might not have to.
"Trust me." Belisario sighed sadly, air escaping him in a prolonged breath that seemed to deflate him, leaving him smaller and crumpled. "It works."
The doctor's dispirited manner sunk into Benito, and he felt a settling weight of guilt for his equivocation over Dona. He had affected concern for Dona's condition, more through a sense of obligation and expectation more than anything else, as tut-tutting about morals seemed to be the polite thing, a social assumption that was a necessary part of life's rituals. His concern had been flicked away the very instant the sense of threat had appeared, though, the ease with which it had been discarded exposing the truth of his feeling. Agonising about humanity had never been a serious concern – the situation of Dona, and all the other girls, was straightforward and uncomplicated.
Benito leaned back against the wall of the bays, and he and Belisario spent the rest of the time in silence. Dona began to blaze away at the targets again, the jack-hammering pound of her sustained fire obscuring all other thought.
After a little over half an hour Dona had exhausted all of the ammunition that she had been given, and the targets at the far end of the range had all been splintered to matchwood. She seemed reluctant to move when Belisario had announced that that would be all for today, and was only cajoled back upright when Bianchi stepped forward and told her that if she helped them a little now, she'd be able to play more later. Belisario frowned at this, and slipped a Dictaphone from his pocket to murmur about how it was not ideal that Dona expected some reason or recompense instead of accepting an instruction without question.
Leaving the weapons where they lay at their firing positions, Dona walked steadily back to the shelter where the spectators were assembled. With a neutral expression and a simple nod of acknowledgement she followed Donato's gestures back out into the car park and into a Fiat van – two of the Carabinieri got in behind her (and in a different row of seats) along with Bianchi (who sat beside her), leaving Donato to take the wheel. The vehicle immediately drove off back towards the Agency compound, so that the only figures left at the range were Belisario, Benito, and the third Carabiniere who was occupied in disassembling and bagging up the weapons that Dona had been using. Where the shelter had once rang with the dizzying rattle of reports, now there was only the faint clinks of scraping metal – it felt like the thin, desultory clatter of pebbles tripping and stumbling in an attempt to keep up with the aftermath of an avalanche, or the pops of shifting fluid that were all your brain could process when your eardrums had burst.
Benito shifted his feet uncomfortably, embarrassedly only able to keep the third Carabiniere in his peripheral vision, as though to gawp at him would only increase the magnitude of his labour.
"Should we, uh, help him?" Benito felt the oppression of obligation creeping across the back of his neck once more, and motioned his head towards the Carabinere in a way that he must have intended to be light and surreptitious but looked as though he was shaking out a cob of ear-wax.
"I don't know," Belisario rubbed his palm against his bearded chin. "Do you know anything about handling a MINIMI?"
Benito looked confused, not seeing the relevance of the doctor's apparent non-sequitir. "Uh, like Austin Powers...?" He looked at Belisario strangely, wondering if he had encountered a desensitised Agency worker making some off-colour joke about the pint-sized nature of the cyborgs.
"No, then." Belisario frowned at the young man's questioning look, wondering where the mere callow youth had gained the experience to let him settle into such a familiar manner."So, you can come with me." Belisario led Benito out of the range and into the Octavia, and they began to follow the van back towards the compound.
The familiarity of the ground they were backtracking across offered no comfort to Benito – while on the way to the range he felt uncomfortably prominent and exposed, this time the inverse was the case. Against the integral figure in Section Two beside him, the rookie data analyst from Section One felt small in the passenger seat with Belisario, shrinking and regressing to a kid who could not even see over the dashboard while his parent drove him to the first day at a new school. From the time that he'd dialled up the fateful phone call, Benito had felt out of sorts, a step removed, tripping along to play catch-up, flapping behind as a scrap of debris caught on something that he didn't fully grasp – to be in the company of those who obviously knew so much more as he, and operated on principles wholly removed from his routine and experience, was disorienting; as nauseating as seasickness. He tried to steady himself by asserting that he himself was indeed an expert in at least something.
"So… a Skoda?" Benito let the question end with just enough of a high pitch to be a sharp, pointed, balloon-bursting prick.
"Yes, a Skoda." Belisario replied smoothly, not taking his eyes off the road. "What make's your car?"
"I don't have one—" Benito admitted.
"That's un-Italian!" Belisario exclaimed. He sensed that he was being interrogated or condescended to and so was determined to land as many jabs as he could in this sparring match.
"—but if I did, I know that I wouldn't want a Skoda." Benito continued, determined.
"How do you work that out?" The road came to a T-junction – even though there was no other vehicle there, Belisario still indicated as he turned.
"Come on," Benito said laughingly, "I might as well be puttering to work in a Model T. For decades they've used hopelessly outdated designs. I mean, have you seen a V16 Skoda? Eight valves in the engine – and eight in the radio!"
Belisario merely grunted. "How old are you, Mr. Zinanni?"
The barb in the emphasised old was not unnoticed, but Belisario wasn't going to stay as the kid having the grown-ups talk down to him. He was a big boy now. "Twenty-two" He answered levelly.
"So, when the Velvet Revolution slid over Czechoslovakia, you were only just coming out of nappies, which leads me to believe that that joke was something that you cribbed off of the internet rather than actually learned through experience."
"It doesn't make it wrong, though." Benito retorted, undaunted. "Skoda cars were the usual commie rustbuckets thrown together with spit and faith in the Great Leader. They were outright dangerous."
"Is that so? I wonder." Belisario mused. "In the Eighties 'outdated' Skoda cars were regular winners on the rally circuit, and for being supposedly shoddy cast-offs flung over the top of the Iron Curtain as you say, people were surprisingly willing to buy them in large numbers, don't you think? How could they be the butt of jokes if they were never driven and seen? They certainly didn't hold up too badly against that standard bearer for free-market entrepreneurialism – 'Fix It Again, Tony'?"
Belisario's observation on the source of Benito's information was telling – the younger man was rapidly running up against the barrier of his own knowledge. "That's un-Italian!" He fixed on Belisario's last remark denigrating the national industrial flag-carrier and tried to turn the scientist's earlier rejoinder back at him.
"The Octavia, in the meantime, has been winning gold medals for reliability across the board. Even if it was legitimate for old Skodas to be so poorly-received, the company's had plenty of time to put it right."
"It's still a Skoda" Benito muttered petulantly.
"Which, for some, is still a problem." Belisario laughed, quoting the company's self-deprecatory slogan.
"Are you getting a cheque from their publicity department?" Benito grunted sullenly, frustrated with the doctor's invincibility.
"No, I just like to have a complete handle on whatever I turn my attention to. It's the nature of my profession." Belisario smiled at the Carabiniere at the gate as he waved the car through back into the compound.
Inspiration suddenly blazed in Benito's mind like the flash and roar of a pan fire. "Is that all compensatory, though? You can know every quality of your car… and that tells you in however many hundred ways how it isn't a Ferrari."
That did seem to give Belisario pause. He was quiet for a few moments, tapping the car's steering wheel. The conditioning chief of the Technology Department glanced out of the drivers' window, to see that he had parked next to Jose Croce's soft-top Porsche. Belisario opened the door to get out of the car – he stopped just short of banging the edge against Jose's own.
"Okay, Mr. Zinanni. If you'd just follow me, I can tell you what this is all about."
Benito was left in an empty meeting room somewhere in the Technology Building, furnished with simple plastic chairs and tables, a thin, wiry carpet, fluorescent tube lighting and a whiteboard mounted on a wall. It reminded him more of his classrooms at middle school than a command centre at the beating heart of espionage and international intrigue. There was, however, one luxury in the form of an automated coffee machine in one corner of the room – the lunch hour had already been and gone during the spectacle on the range, so Benito didn't consider it to be a misappropriation of Agency funds to liberate a few charges from the sachet rack and cough and grind out a Styrofoam cup of caffeine for himself.
Benito was on his third cup and was amusing himself by drawing cartoon animals eating each other on the whiteboard when Belisario finally returned. Bianchi came in as well, and both men were carrying large cardboard document boxes, which banged noisily and heavily as they were set down on the nearest table to the door. Puffing out a breath that was intended to be a philosophical sigh but did not entirely mask a gasp of exertion, Belisario took a seat and motioned for Benito to do the same. Benito scraped a chair across the floor – the carpet doing nothing to cushion the hardness underneath it – to do that, and as he did so he noticed that Bianchi was hesitating to sit down. The psychologist was peering across the room, scrutinising Benito's drawings on the whiteboard. Benito's face twitched in a grin. He hadn't meant anything particular with his formidable and unflinching depiction of the bitter evolutionary struggle of nature red in tooth and claw – it just seemed something a bit more interesting than the squares that his father tended to sketch in the corner of his address book after being left on hold for half an hour. That said, he could imagine that the shrink would now be doing mental backflips over what he had witnessed – even if it had been unintentional Benito felt a thrill of mischief quiver in him as he wondered how many evenings Bianchi would spend agonising over the import of his cave-wall daubing.
"Sorry to keep you waiting like this, Mr. Zinnani, hopefully we won't have to keep you much longer." Belisario began, bringing Benito's attention back down to the table as Bianchi eventually sat down himself.
"No worries." Benito reassured the doctor. "Lately I've been little more than a data entry clerk. I could do without another week typing up Raquel Morne of Genoa's arguments with her mother in Basilicata about her work, pay, and boyfriends."
Bianchi decided not to mention that such lowly grunt work was punishment from Chief Draghi for Benito and Toni's clumsy handling of attempts to contact Dona during Operation Painter-2. Instead his opening gambit was a little less confrontational. "You might want that reassurance of regularity soon enough, Mr. Zinnani. What we want to ask of you may be... demanding."
"This goes back to Section One and Two's joint operation in Milan last month." Belisario continued immediately. "I'm sure you're aware of the particulars?"
"Who couldn't be?" Benito tried to act nonchalant about his role in Painter-2, which was just as well as he had been one of the skeleton crew left behind at the Agency whilst virtually everyone else in both Sections had been turned out and sent north to search the city – and he remembered acutely the sting of being bawled out by the Section Two chief for not being first out of the starting blocks to respond when Dona, their errant cyborg and object of the search, had contacted the Agency, even though he had run a trace and it wasn't his fault if the flighty and confused cyborg had hung up straight away...
"Then you'll know that Donatello, the girl you saw at the range earlier, was the cyborg of the handler who lost his life in Milan." Belisario confirmed.
"Cyborgs, especially those of the first generation, form profound and intense bonds with their handlers." Bianchi smoothly picked up from where Belisario left off. "It's no exaggeration to say that the loss of a precious handler is several orders of magnitude worse than a real child losing her father. Dona has suffered, greatly, over these past two weeks... it's a true bereavement, something that we're doing our utmost to relieve."
"So you can make good on the cost of building her by getting her able to fight and kill again?" Benito drawled languorously. "How charitable of you."
Bianchi narrowed his eyes, unimpressed with Benito's performance. "Obviously I need to revise my personnel file. I never had you pegged as the cynical type, Mister Zinanni – although I suppose that I ought to have trusted my better judgement. Typical smug and self-satisfied Generation Y, you think you know it all."
"I trust that you don't have a problem with Donatello's occupation, otherwise you wouldn't have been accepted into the Agency in the first place." Belisario also declined to rise to Benito's bait, robbing the Young Turk of an opportunity to put himself one up over the Old Guard.
Disappointed that the two other men wouldn't play the game but determined to stay proactive in the conversation, Benito inferred something for himself. "So, I take it that I can help in some way to bring – Donatello?" – whatever the logic behind it, the name still sounded silly for a little girl – "up to speed... although I'm not sure how." He lost steam as he was forced to concede the final point.
"Following the trauma of losing her handler, Dona withdrew into a catatonic shell." Bianchi explained. "We've been trying to coax her out of it by replicating her life with her handler as closely as possible, giving her as many points of reference and reassurance as we can. 'Trick' her, if you will, into thinking that it is life as usual and that nothing untoward has happened. The clothes she wears, the food she eats, hairstyle, her preference for fully automatic weapons, the particular grades of pencil she uses to draw with..."
"And video games." Belisario looked vaguely embarrassed.
"Hence the notice?" Benito asked.
"...yeah." Belisario shifted his feet.
"Which is a topic that lies outside your research specialty?" Benito pressed, hiding a smirk at the technologist's discomfort.
"I suppose so." Belisario looked vaguely irritated, as one who held four doctorates might when informed that he was not quite the central reference index for all Creation. He compensated by tipping his head back in an arch expression, as though he was a sophisticate of Society condescending to allow a menial of Trade a few coins to scurry away to a corner and perform his sooty witchcraft if he would come back with a return for his business.
In contrast, Bianchi was more engaging – he leaned forward over the table to come closer to Benito as he spoke. "We have a very sick girl here, Mr. Zinanni, one who genuinely needs help and care. Any insight, or even just a suggestion, that you can give would be a great help to us in getting her back on her feet." Bianchi paused for a moment, glancing to one side as he reflected on Benito's earlier statements. "Healing a person to live again, or mending a machine to serve our purpose once more – however you want to spin it, it doesn't matter. This is not a good state for anyone, or anything, to be in. The Social Welfare Agency exists for the sake of girls like this." Bianchi was genuine and earnest.
Benito was quiet for a moment, and then he shrugged with a wry smile. "Well, it's not every day that your bosses actually tell you to slob around playing on the computer all day... I ought not to look a gift horse in the mouth."
Belisario afforded himself a small smile too. "Fret ye not, Mister Zinnani, you needn't worry about your efforts here with us causing your own analytical skills to wither on the vine – you will still have plenty of opportunity to exercise them." He slapped the top of one of the two document boxes that he and Bianchi had carried in to the room. "These are Donatello's handler's notes and diaries on his cyborg management. Naturally, as we are trying to replicate Donatello's pre-trauma routine, you'll need to study these thoroughly before your... therapy sessions can begin."
There was one thing to be said for working for a secret government agency – at least you never had to take your work back home with you.
Benito waved down from his apartment window to Carlo's car, which pulled away with an acknowledging honk of the horn. He then picked up the telephone from its stand by the window and dialled the Agency.
"Hello, Carlita, it's Benito Zinanni reporting in. The day code is DCD76. Back home with no troubles."
"Right, Ben. Have a nice night."
"You too." The connection was cut.
The ritual dispensed with, Benito put the phone back down and turned away from the window to the rest of his apartment.
It was a one-bedroom apartment, small but entirely functional with all modern amenities. While its actual area in terms of floor plan was small, it still had a feeling of space - only the bedroom and a small bath (or shower) room were separate while the breakfast bar also served as dinner table and work desk – or, rather than it rotating roles, it served all three simultaneously as he split it up into thirds for separate piles of papers and crockery. However, unkempt that corner was, though, Benito did keep a clean home and the conservation of space did allow for a wide and comfortable lounge area with a large couch (which had already been there when he moved in – heaven knows how they squeezed it up four stories) and coffee table to put his feet up on. It was, in short, exactly the sort of standard conventional dwelling that Benito imagined was the norm in most new blocks nowadays. There was nothing to indicate that he had a (junior, entry-level, probationary) role in the – whisper it! – Secret Service, except maybe for a shelf ornamented with a history book on Operation Gladio, several cheap Segretissimo paperbacks, an unopened copy of the CIA World Factbook and a fitful and haphazard collection of Janes' International Defence Review with issues often several months apart.
Benito would have preferred to have lived in an more traditional style of building around a central court, but Section One regulations actually forbade that type of living because it was deemed 'too social' for people who were expected to be discreet as a matter of course. Benito thought that it was a needless hoop to jump through, a bit of bossiness from the Chief Draghi as he threw his weight about and asserted himself over the department... it wasn't as if the place he lived in now kept next door's full-volume television from blaring away through the wall any quieter.
So, there it was, laid out before him – one bedroom, one bathroom, one table, one chair, one couch, one life.
He supposed that he could call it a bachelor pad, but that name had pretensions of urbane style and savvy in society which Benito in all honesty couldn't say he possessed.
Benito held himself still for several long moments, thinking of what to think about, and then glanced again at the window, seeing the his reflected ghost look back into the room, its faded enervation sloughing away extraeneous detail from his essential core. A few inches shy of six feet. A build that he liked to call lean but was most likely pasty. Neat, dark office trousers, and a deep orange shirt – striking but not obnoxious – with a black tie. Poking out of the neck, though, was a couple of days of stubble that didn't look quite too scruffy just yet, and hair that wasn't thick or long at this juncture but was still putting off visiting a comb.
Benito suddenly jerked himself back away from the window and shook his head vigorously, rattling his brain about. Good grief, what was he doing in such a glum funk? Reassessing himself? Why? He saw cyborgs at the Agency all the time! Well, he sometimes caught a glance of one standing behind her handler at the other end of the office, perhaps once or twice a week. This would be no different. He'd be directing the technologists to a few websites, maybe answering questions on a bit of jargon, and that would be it. It wasn't as if Section Two would let any of the mere facilitators from Section One ever play with their toys.
Admonishing himself for the ease with which he allowed himself to be spooked – he was inflating it all far beyond its real import, treating these things as something spectral – Benito tugged his tie off in a certain show that he was now relaxing, and threw it over the back of the couch before plopping himself down on it and flicking on the television.
He tapped through a variety of programs for around half an hour. Each time he lifted the remote control, it was to tip his chin back up from drifting down to the two consoles that sat on the shelf beneath the television. Now that someone else was taking note of his pastime, he didn't feel like playing on them – something private and personal, on opportunity to see himself and enjoy himself with no particular demand of conduct or burden of expectation belabouring the experience, had been somehow... skewed. Like a crooked picture, it itched at the eye and cricked at his neck with the strain of tipping his head to see it from a strange angle, and for now at least he just couldn't look at it right.
Still, he supposed he ought to make some inroads into that Courage's Edge campaign, now...
No. No, no, no. This was leisure, he wouldn't let it be appropriated.
Wrenching his face into a determined frown and with a surge of grim decision, Benito lifted himself from the couch, grabbed the CIA World Factbook off of its shelf, opened it with a creak of its spine at a random page, and spent the evening learning all about the demographics of Eritrea, returns for ballots on independence from France in New Caledonia, and the price of cocoa in Cameroon.
(Continued)