Marines?” his mother cried. “Goddess, why would you want to join the Marines?”
John Garroway Esteban stood a little straighter, fists clenched at his side. “You had no right!” he said, shouting at his father, defiant. “My noumen is mine!”
“It’s my house, you’re my son!” his father shouted back, raging. The elder Esteban had been drinking, and his words were slurred. “I paid for your implant, and I can goddamn do anything in, to, or through your goddamn noumen I goddamn want!”
“Carlos, please,” John’s mother said. She was crying now. This was going to be a bad one.
They’d had this argument before, many times. John’s Sony implant created the inner, virtual world through which he could access the World Net, communicate with friends, and even operate noumenally keyed devices, from thought-clicked doors to the family flyer. Noumenon was the conceptual opposite to phenomenon; where a phenomenon was something that happened outside a person’s thoughts, in the real world, a noumenon was entirely a creation of thought and imagination, a virtual reality opened within his mind … but the one was no less real than the other. As the saying went, just because it was all in your head didn’t mean it wasn’t real.
It was also personal, keyed to John’s own thoughts and implant access codes. His father, however, insisted on supervising him through the implant, and the almost daily invasions of his privacy gnawed at John constantly.
Lots of kids had implants with parental controls, if only to monitor their study downloads and keep track of the entertainment Net sites they visited. Carlos Esteban went a lot further, eavesdropping on his conversations with Lynnley, reading his private files, and now downloading his conversation with the Marine recruiter three days ago. Every time John managed to assemble a counterprogram, like the yellow warning light, his father found a way around it … or simply bulled his way right in.
And his father was, of course, furious at his decision to join the Marines. He’d expected his father’s anger but had hoped his mother would understand. She was del Norte, after all, and a Garroway besides.
“No son of mine is going to be part of those butchers,” his father was saying. “The Butchers of Ensenada! No! I will not permit it! You will join me in the family business, and that is that!”
“I don’t want to be a part of the damned family business!” John shot back. “I want—”
“You are eighteen years old,” his father said, his voice rich with scorn. “You have no idea what it is you want!”
“Then maybe this is how I’ll find out!” He swung his arm angrily, taking in the quietly sophisticated sweep of the hacienda’s E-room and dining area, including the floor-to-ceiling viewall overlooking the silver waters of the Sea of Cortez below Cabo Haro. “I won’t if I stay here the rest of my life!”
A tone sounded. The house was signaling them: someone was at the door. He wanted to snatch the excuse, to pull up the visitor’s ID through his implant and go open the door … but his father was glaring into his eyes, furious, and the brief wandering of his thoughts would have been immediately noticed.
“You have here the promise of a good education!” Carlos continued, shouting. If he’d heard the announcement tone, he was ignoring it. “Of a place in the family business when you graduate. Security! Comfort! What more could you possibly need or want?” Carlos Jesus Esteban took another long sip from the glass of whiskey he held. He’d been drinking more and more heavily of late, and his temper had been getting shorter.
“Maybe I just want the chance to get those things for myself. To get an education and a job without having them handed to me!”
“Eh? With the Marines? What can they teach you? How to kill people? How to shed whatever civilized instincts you may have acquired and become an animal, a sociopathic murderer? Is that what you want?”
The house butler rolled in. “Excuse me,” it said. “There is—”
“Get out!” the elder Esteban screamed.
“Yes, sir.” Obediently, the robot spun about and glided out of the room once more, as though it was used to Carlos’s violent moods.
“You just want to go with those worthless gringo friends of yours,” his father continued. “You think military service is some sort of glamorous game, eh?”
“Have you thought about joining the Navy, Johnny?” his mother asked helpfully, with a worried, sidelong glance at his father. “Or the Aerospace Force? I mean, if you want to travel, to go offworld—”
“All of the services are parasites!” Carlos shouted, turning on her. “And the Marines are the worst! Invaders, oppressors, with their boots on our throats!”
“My grandfather was a Marine,” John said with more patience than he felt. “As was his father. And his mother and father. And—”
“All your mother’s side of the family,” his father snapped. He drained the last of his whiskey, then moved to the bar to pour himself another. He appeared to be calming down. His voice was quieter, his movements smoother. A dangerous sign. “Not mine. Always, it is the damned Garroways—”
“Carlos!” his mother said. “That’s not fair!”
“No? Please excuse me, Princessa del Norte! The gringos are always in the right, of course!”
“Carlos—”
“Shut up, puta! This worthless excuse for a son is your fault!”
The house had been signaling for several moments, first with an audible tone, then with a soft voice transmitted through John’s cerebral implants. No doubt the butler had been dispatched with the same warning: someone was still at the front door. A quick check with the house security camera showed him Lynnley Collins’s face.
Now might be his only chance.
“I’ll, um, see who’s at the door,” he said, and slipped as unobtrusively as possible from the room. His father was still screaming at his mother as he rode the curving line of moving steps from the E-center to the entranceway, alerting the house as he descended to open the door.
Lynnley was standing on the front deck, looking particularly fetching in a yellow sunsuit that bared her breasts to the bright, golden warmth of the Sonoran sun. Her dark-tanned skin glistened under her body’s UV-block secretions. Her eyes, with her sunscreen implants fully triggered, appeared large and jet-black.
“Uh, hi,” he said, slipping easily into English. Lynnley was the daughter of a norteamericano family stationed at the naval base up at Tiburón. She spoke excellent Spanish, but he preferred using English when he was with her.
She glanced past him as he stepped outside, brushing back a stray wisp of dark blond hair. The door hissed shut, cutting off his father’s muffled shouts.
“Whoo,” she said. “Bad one?”
He shrugged. “Pretty much what I expected, I guess.”
“That bad?” She touched his arm in sympathy. “So what are you going to do?”
“What
