Using Roberta’s forged security card, he gains access into several rooms. They’re all the same. Long wards lined with empty beds, perhaps fifty in each. It’s in the fourth room he visits that he hits the jackpot.
In this room, the beds are occupied.
He had a suspicion of what he might see, but imagining it and seeing it are two different things.
In each bed is a rewind, like himself . . . and yet not like himself. Some still wear bandages, but others, whose healing is further along, have the bandages removed, so he can see their faces and much of their bodies. These rewinds bear none of the aesthetic grace that Cam does. They are sloppy and ugly, as if assembled with the perfunctory hand of a hack, or worse, an assembly line. There is no regard to symmetry, or to the balancing of skin tone. Seams cut at strange angles across each figure, and the scars are far worse than any scars Cam ever had. While his scars were treated to disappear over time, he suspects these will have no such treatment.
None of them have yet awakened. They are all in an induced state of preconsciousness—a sort of integration gestation. He suspects that they are being kept comatose much longer than Cam was, as their many parts heal themselves into living beings. This building is their womb, and Cam realizes that this is where he must have begun as well. As Cam walks down the aisle, looking to his left and right at these preconscious beings, he finds it hard to catch his breath, as if the oxygen has been sucked out of the room.
There is one thing they all share other than the commonality of their randomness. Each of them has a mark on the right ankle. At first he thinks they’re tattoos, but when he looks closer he sees that they’re actually seared into the skin. They’re brands. And they say PROPERTY OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY followed by a serial number. The one Cam examines is numbered 00042. The presence of three zeroes suggests they will eventually number in the tens of thousands.
I am the idea, thinks Cam, but they are the reality. And finally, he sees his place in all of this. He will be the face the world sees. The one they become comfortable with. The public image of the military rewind. He’ll be an officer, lauded and honored, and as such, he will not only open the door, but also pave the way for an army of rewinds. Perhaps it will start small. A special force called upon for a key maneuver somewhere in the world, for there are always American interests to protect somewhere, some violent insurgency that must be addressed. REWINDS SAVE THE DAY! the headlines will read. Just as people became complacent and comfortable with unwinding, they will do the same for rewinding. What a fine thing, people will say, that the unwanted bits of humanity can be reformed and repurposed to serve the greater good. Like the way unwanted pork parts can be ground and pressed and reformed into a tasty pimento loaf. Cam would be sick to his stomach, but he feels he doesn’t have the right, because now, more than ever before, he truly has the sense that his stomach is not his own.
“Cam?”
He turns to see Roberta standing at the entrance. Good. He’s glad she’s here.
“You didn’t have to sneak in here. I would have shown you, if you had asked.” Which is, of course, a lie—she already told him her work was top secret. His instinct is to point an accusing finger for the blatant hubris of what she’s done here, but instead, he plays his emotions close, hoping she doesn’t see the bile collecting within him, and he tells her calmly, “I could have asked, but I wanted to see them on my own terms.”
“And how do you feel about what you see?” She watches him closely, so he buries his fury and revulsion. Instead he allows only an acceptable amount of ambivalence to bubble to the surface. “I knew I wasn’t the be-all and end-all of your work . . . but to see it is . . .”
“Distressing?”
“Sobering,” he says. “And maybe a little enlightening.” He looks to the closest rewind, who stirs slightly in preconscious slumber. “Was an army always your plan?”
“Certainly not!” she says, a bit insulted by the suggestion. “But even my dreams must give way to reality. It was the military who expressed an interest in what we could do, the military who could afford to fund it. So here we are.”
And then Cam realizes that he’s the one who made all this possible. He’s the one who romanced General Bodeker and Senator Cobb. Of course, the military doesn’t need rewinds who can speak nine languages, recite poetry, and play the guitar. It needs rewinds who follow orders. Nonentities who are legally considered “property,” who don’t need to be paid, and who have no rights.
“You look pensive.” Roberta comes closer to get a good look at him. He doesn’t flinch or crack in the least.
“I was thinking how brilliant it is.”
“Really?”
“Soldiers who have no families to go back to? Whose entire identity begins with their military service? A stroke of genius! And I’ll bet you can tweak them the way you tweaked me—to find their greatest satisfaction in their service.”
Roberta smiles, but hesitantly. “I’m impressed that you’ve grasped the scope of this so quickly.”
“It’s . . . visionary,” Cam tells her. “Perhaps one day I’ll be the commanding officer of all my rewind brethren.”
“Perhaps you will be.”
He turns and walks casually to the door. Roberta walks beside him, watching him, always watching him. “Now that you know, you can put it to rest, and get on with your life. And it will be a glorious life, Cam. They need it to be. You must be seen as a prince among peasants, and General Bodeker knows that. You will want for nothing. You will be treated with respect. You will be happy.”