Uzezi Tarot

It was a lovely evening.  The daffodils along Paris Street were in bloom.  The early spring breeze was brisk but promised warmer weather.  Audrey passed the outdoor café where a group of Germans sat quaffing beer, ignoring the chill, waiting for the Old Town clock to hit the hour and do its thing.  Just then the hot-rodded aquamarine chip on her temple sparked blue and a text icon flashed on the infoLayer in her mind.  It was Marc.

‘Je suis très désolé mon chéri but I am unavoidably delayed one hour. When Uzezi arrives I will let her in and you two can start without me.’

Crap, he would be late, but start without him?  No fucking way!  Audrey wasn’t about meet her boyfriend’s ex for the first time alone.  Absolutely no fucking way.  Okay, Uzezi was an old ex, but still an ex.  What the hell would we talk about anyway?  Sex with Marc?  Yeah, sure.  She still had twenty minutes before Uzezi was supposed to arrive, so she figured there was enough time to pop into Marc’s place, drop off the wine she’d just bought, and split before Uzezi showed up.  Then she’d wait for them at the Kava Art Bar.

Wheezing hacking catcalls followed Audrey as she crossed the Old Town square.  It was the Aqualung geezer who sold gummies and spliffs at the LokoWeed kiosk.  Always there, always the same.  You’d think his shtick would get old.  She flashed him the usual finger and headed down a narrow winding cobblestoned lane until she came to number 28.  She pushed open the huge wood door, walked up four flights of old stone stairs, faced the scanner, and the lock let her in.  Marc’s place was a tiny top floor flat tucked away behind a round window under a baroque dormer.  To her surprise the lights were on.  A woman’s voice with a lilting accent floated up from the couch under the round window.  “Oh, hello!  I am Uzezi.  You must be Audrey.”

Shit, shit, shit! Audrey cursed to herself, I walked right into it!  There goes the avoidance plan!

“You have good timing, I only just arrived.  I am early but Marc let me in remotely.”

Good timing my ass Audrey thought but smiled anyway.

Uzezi stood and Audrey couldn’t help but notice her delicate and graceful movement.   She was slim, tall, dark, beautiful, bewitching.  Figures.  Marc always goes for babes.

Uzezi’s eyes, playful and impudent, were made-up like the feathers of a tropical bird.  She wore a raw umber minidress the colour of her skin, matching pumps, and yellow, yellow, yellow, tights, necklace, bracelets, yellow sunshine in her hair.  And a fabulously expensive Toshiba BlackDiamond chip in a MisuSu setting.  Clearly Carnaby Street Mod grrrl had deep pockets.

Audrey placed the wine on the table and Uzezi moved in for a light hug-kiss-kiss.  As they stood facing each other it hit Audrey that they were, in fact, similar in many ways.   They were alike in height and build.  They might have been a pair of matching bookends, shapely and exotic.  Fuck, is this Marc’s type?  It irritated her that maybe she could be classified as such, as a card-carrying member of Marc’s Type.  Well, fuck that.  There was no way she was go-go Carnaby Street Mod.  Not her thing.  No, Audrey radiated badass artPunk: pale skin, platinum hair glowing in hues of ice, a black unitard, black bovver boots, a severe black leather jacket and tar-pit video-morph earrings.   For a moment Uzezi held Audrey’s eyes with an inquisitive friendly look.  Audrey’s arctic X-ray lips smiled, but her wintry sapphire eyes, hid behind a band of smoky indigo makeup and revealed nothing.

“I was held up by professor Lipavský after the lecture,” Marc explained as he walked in an hour later.  He had a French accent, a French I-haven’t-shaved-for-three-days face, a Toshiba Green chip that matched his ocean-green eyes, a patterned pine-green Italian silk scarf, and an umber Italian soft rumpled suede jacket.  “Je suis désolé, but I see you two are getting along.”

Your damned ex was early!  Audrey shot Marc a look but kept the thought to herself.

Marc ignored Audrey’s dagger eyes.  He was by now accustomed to her prickly temper—mon épine, my thorn, was his term of endearment for her.  Yes, it was a bit disconcerting to have his ex meet his current in his flat without being around to supervise the introduction, but shit happens, it couldn’t be helped.  C’est comme ça.  He walked to the kitchenette to unpack the groceries he’d just bought and used the vantage point to survey the situation.  Pretending not to be surprised, he glanced at the lipstick smeared wine glasses and the Tarot cards spread haphazardly face-down on the table.

“Marc, I love her!” Uzezi sang out, “I absolutely love her.  She is everything you described to me, and more.”

‘She’s buttering me up’ Audrey texted Marc, chip to chip, mind-to-mind direct.

Marc ignored the text.  “I’d have slipped out of Lipavský’s clutches and come straight home had I known Audrey was here,” he said looking dubiously at Uzezi as he put some cheeses on a plate.

“What,” Uzezi laughed, “and deny us the opportunity to get to know each other in your absence?”

“You mean to talk about me behind my back...?”  Marc set the cheese on the table, picked up Audrey’s bottle of wine, raised a somewhat bemused brow, poured himself the half-glass that remained, went to the cupboard for a new bottle, opened it, and sat down. 

“Marc, I know it’s hard for you to believe this,” Uzezi said in a teasing voice, “but we actually weren’t talking about you.”

Marc smiled a yeah, sure smile.  “I see you have already brought out your cards,” he said.

“I know you don’t approve of them, Marc, but it’s because Audrey and I were talking about free will and karma—we were debating whether the future is open, or has it been determined by past actions?  Of course the Tarot came up.”

“Of course,” Marc said, filled everyone’s glasses, and winked at Audrey.  “With Uzezi, the Tarot always comes up.”

“We had agreed that if there is free will,” Uzezi picked up her glass, “the future can’t be set in stone.  And if the future is determined, then there can’t be free will.”  She took a sip of wine.  “I happen to think it’s both, or maybe neither.  And I thought the Tarot can explain it better.”  She pointed to the cards.  “I was about to explain to Audrey that the Tarot doesn’t predict a fixed future.  Instead, it reflects all the currents of the moment that determine the future…and like everything in the universe, those currents are flowing and changing all the time, which means the future isn’t immutable but instead it’s always changing.”

“Meaning, that tomorrow the cards might be different for the same question,” Audrey pointed out

“In ten minutes, they could be different,” Uzezi said, “in fact, they will be different.”

“But that’s the point, isn’t it?” Audrey said, “that’s where this whole Tarot thing falls down.  The cards have to be different every single time you draw them.  That’s because you shuffle them, and the draw is random.  The probability of drawing the same cards twice in a row is infinitesimal.  You’re just making up fancy theories to account for probability.”

“Of course, but given everything you say, which is true, it still happens that if the situation is similar, the cards will tell a similar story.  And if it isn’t, they won’t.”

“How can something that’s just a product of probability tell a story?” Audrey asked, “it’s just random, it’s chance…unless you’re a card shark and you manipulate the cards to chose the ones you want.”

“Then shall we try them?” Uzezi suggested with a smile, “it’s the only way to find out.  And in case you think I’m a card shark, I’ll let you do all the shuffling and choosing and I’ll keep my hands off of them.”

“Et alors,” Marc said, “why not?  But I should warn you, Audrey, the cards don’t lie.  I’ve learned this from Uzezi.  I don’t believe in them, but they’re right every time.  They always tell the truth.”  He looked at Uzezi. “What are we analyzing tonight?”

 “Why, the two of you of course!”  Uzezi made a fluid motion with her hand, “so... let’s see…” Uzezi waved her hand over the cards spread across the table, “Audrey, why don’t you turn one over?  You can mix them up first, of course, if you prefer.”

What!?  Me!?  She’s analyzing Marc and me?!

To Audrey the Tarot was, well, it was crap, bolloxology, nonsense—little pieces of cardboard with pictures on them, drawn at random, pretending to tell deep truths but more screwy tinfoil hat than cryptic hocus-pocus.  Except, well, except that there was that one time The Fool, the one from the Tarot, had appeared to her in SIM—simulated reality—decked out in tights, boots, flowery tunic, white flower in one hand, hobo bag on a stick in the other, the whole enchilada.  Rider-Waite Fool, her chip helpfully declared.  Standing on rasterizing water in an ancient technicolour SIMsite, he spoke to her in riddles.  But that had been different.  First, it had taken place in SIM, so it had nothing to do with Real, nothing to do with pieces of cardboard, nothing to do with fortune telling.  And, although it had, unquestionably, been weird, and maybe even totally creepy, it wasn’t because of any mystical-magical stuff.   It was because there was a good chance the apparition was dangerous.  It could have been a Trojan trying to fool her, trying to infect her chip with a virus, or maybe something worse, way worse, something like an iNs8nRaptor—mutated software gone feral, a digital predator sniffing around, seeking to infect her mind and turn it into an over-nuked zucchini.  No going back from that one.  Digital Chucky, not Harry Potter. 

But that had been then in SIM and now was now in Real, and now Audrey was buzzed on fine wine, so what the hell—maybe she shouldn’t diss things just because she didn’t believe in them.  And anyway, Uzezi intrigued her: was that Mod grrrl free spirit vibe for real or just a TikTok fakeFace?  Audrey was dying to know.  So, yes, what the hell, she turned over a card.  Her chip immediately identified it: ‘The Lovers, from the Thoth Tarot,’ flashed the infoLayer in her mind, ‘deck designd by Alister Crawley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris.  According to Aleister Crowley’s Book of Thoth, the card is…’ Audrey thoughtClicked her chip’s infoLayer off, wanting to focus only on what Uzezi had to say.  Her chip would remember everything anyway and she could always Google it later and compare.  

“Ahh, The Lovers!” Uzezi exclaimed.

“How appropriate!” Audrey said, not trying to hide the sarcasm.  ‘Lovers?’ she texted Marc again, thinking that this time this was like, duh, a little obvious, ‘Us or U 2?’ she added.

Uzezi smiled like she knew and reached to cut a piece of cheese.  Marc didn’t answer.

“So…is it referring to current lovers?” Audrey asked, “or past lovers?”  It had now been a few months that they’d been together, and Audrey figured she and Marc were an item.  At least they weren’t shopping around anymore, but then again, once upon a time, Marc and Uzezi had stopped shopping around too.  She wondered what had sent them into splitsville,

“Good question,” Uzezi put the knife down, “The Lovers can speak on different levels...basically they represent the merging, or assimilating, of opposites.  It can be sexual,” she picked the card up, “it can be romantic, intellectual…mystical…”

Audrey didn’t do mystical, but sexual, romantic, intellectual—she connected with Marc on all those levels, and she assumed Uzezi did too. “So how do you know which one?” she asked.

“I don’t.”

Marc took a bemused sip of wine.

“You see, the card speaks of the fulfillment that comes when we lose our ego and merge,” Uzezi explained, “…an obvious example is an orgasm with a lover…but it can also be a spiritual union,” she drew her hand across the air, “with a god, the universe…whatever.  It’s about transcending duality, transcending the division between yourself and the other.”  She paused a moment and took a sip of wine.  “But it’s a little more complicated than that,” Uzezi tipped her head, “things can go wrong. Lovers can end up heartbroken, if, for instance, it turns out they’re not compatible, or, maybe, the object of their love is a projection of their desires, just a mirage with no substance...or,” she winked at Audrey, “only one of them had the orgasm.”

“But I still don’t get if this is referring to past or present lovers,” Audrey said.

Uzezi shrugged.  “It is the context that tells us.  Pick another card and we shall see.”

Audrey turned over another card.  This one looked kind of like the Greek god Hermes tripping the light fantastic in space and time.  But instead of Hermes, it was labeled The Magus, which Audrey figured must be a magician of some sort, but her chip’s infoLayer was off, so she didn’t know for sure.  But what she did know was that the Crowley cards seemed to have a creepy-666-Voldemort-dark-lord vibe.  And she wondered how this Crowley creepy vibe jibed with Uzezi’s Carnaby Street vibe.  Did Mod grrrl have a dark side?

“There is vital energy here,” Uzezi pointed at the card, “The Magus represents the magic of creation, he juggles the energies of the four elements and synthesizes them into physical form, into reality...but The Magus is also a trickster, you can’t trust him…he might weave a veil of lies you mistake for truth.”

‘Real or illusion?’  Audrey’s text popped into Marc’s head. 

This time Marc answered her: ‘Real and illusion.’ He glanced at Audrey from under a wayward strand of Cary Grant hair.  ‘The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.’

‘Another quote from your Camus files ?’ Audrey texted back.  Their relationship had started off on the wrong foot, and then solidified, both having something to do with Camus.

Uzezi waited for the silent conversation to end.  “We have The Lovers and The Magus,” she touched one, and then the other.  “I think that these two cards together tell me you are lucky to have found each other...”

“Or,” Audrey pointed out, “you two are lucky to have found each other, again.”

“We are three people whose lives are intertwined, and the cards reflect that…” Uzezi tapped her fingers on the cards, “…but if you want to find out, pick one more card, Audrey.”

Audrey flipped a card over.

“Ah, it is you Audrey!” Uzezi exclaimed, “the Princess of Swords!”

“Me?  A Princess?”

“The Princess of Swords represents a cerebral person,” with an easy gesture Uzezi indicated Audrey, “which is you!  The good thing is, the Princess’ sharp mind can keep her from chasing a mirage, or from being fooled by tricks and illusions.  But the downside is that because she’s a Princess, because she’s not mature, she can unintentionally cut and hurt with her intellect.  She is not always easy to get along with...Marc, you are just going to have to learn to be patient...”

“I know,” Marc grinned, “this is why I call her mon épine.”

“Your thorn?” Uzezi lifted her brows.

Audrey hit Marc with a look.  Marc picked up the bottle and re-filled the wine glasses.  “I warned you, Audrey.  The cards don’t lie.”

“It’s good you have a sense of humour about your relationship, Marc, because you are an idealist, and the dark side of idealism is intolerance.”  Uzezi then drew Audrey in with huge expressive eyes.  “You know what I am talking about, don’t you, Audrey?  Ha, ha!  Yes, of course you do!” Uzezi’s charisma lit the room.  She leaned close to Marc.  “She’s a good match for you, Marc, she sees through your idealist self-righteous bullshit.”  Uzezi could have said anything, Audrey thought, and they’d still be smiling and laughing with her.

“But maybe now I will be a card shark,” Uzezi winked at Audrey, “I want to see what I find in you, Audrey,” Uzezi scooped the cards up, shuffled, and tossed one onto the table, a Five of Wands.  Strife, it was labeled.

“Strife?  That sounds like it kinda sucks,” Audrey said.

Uzezi said nothing but instead tossed another card, this time a Two of Disks—Change.  She pondered the two cards for a moment.  “Audrey, I don’t know you, but,” Uzezi searched Audrey’s saphire eyes, “there is something inside of you…something you are trying to avoid, to hide from, but only by changing can you be free of its shadow.”

Audrey shifted in her chair.

Uzezi pondered for a moment.  “Maybe it’s a hurt you hide, even from yourself.” She threw one more card down, the Eight of Swords, Interference.  “Maybe something traumatic in your past you’d rather forget...”

This was getting close.  Scary close.  It made no sense, but these pieces of cardboard were trashing her comfort zone.  Audrey fronted her best poker face.

Uzezi could tell Audrey didn’t want to divulge, and so let it go.  Instead she picked up all the cards and shuffled again.  “Now for you, Marc,” she threw two on the table and turned one over, “ahh…your soul is true and loving.”

“This is my curse,” Marc shrugged in that French way.

Uzezi smiled and pointed to the card, the Knight of Cups.  “You search for meaning in compassion and sacrifice, so you seek to help others, which explains why we met…has he ever told you the story, Audrey?”

Audrey nodded noncommittally—she’d heard something about it from Marc, but maybe not the whole story?

“I met Marc when he was living in Lagos.”

“Oui, Audrey knows about Lagos,” Marc said.  He had spent two years there as a paramedic, driving an ambulance for Médecins sans Frontières.

“It was at a party honouring MSF at the French Embassy,” Uzezi said, “it was the usual for Lagos, expats mixing with vip locals, and I was hanging out in the garden with some friends…”

“You were invited to a party at the French embassy?” Audrey interrupted, “that’s pretty fuKool.  I’ve never been invited to anything like that.”

“This is because your father isn’t a minister in the government,” Marc pointed out as he reached for the bread, mascara amplifying the significant look in his bottle green eyes.  “The family of Uzezi is very important in Nigeria.”

“Yes, they are,” Uzezi said, “I come from an influential family, but I’ve always been a rebel, which is why us delinquents were in the garden slipping dreamWater into our champagne, instead of making small talk and rubbing elbows with fatcats and poobahs in the ballroom.  Then this handsome man,” she indicated Marc, “shows up, and of course I offered him some.”

“Oui, the party became,” Marc smiled at the memory, “much more interesting after the dreamWater.”

“I’ll bet,” Audrey said, “and then after the party…?”

“Rien…nothing,” Marc said, “but I did ask Uzezi if she wanted to go out with me …”

“I was intrigued, so I said maybe and gave Marc my number.”

“She never answered my texts…”

“I was playing a hard to get,” Uzezi laughed, “but let’s get back to the cards—maybe they will tell us the story in their own way.”  Uzezi flipped the second card over, the Ace of Swords.  “Marc,” she touched his wrist, “this tells us that all that emotion and compassion of the Knight of Cups is rooted in intellectual clarity.  It is this mixture of the goodwill of your heart and the purity of your truth that makes you strive to become that which you wish the world to be.”

“That’s so true,” Audrey smiled, “it’s a wonderful quality of his.”

“Yes, it is,” Uzezi agreed.  She threw Marc a long lost look that Audrey caught too.

“So in the end you texted him back?” Audrey asked.

 “No.  Before I did, we met again…”

“My ambulance was responding to injuries at the University.  When I arrive, there I find Uzezi.  Her friend had been shot.”

“Oh my god!” Audrey exclaimed, “what happened?”

“Security drones fired live rounds into a peaceful student protest,” Uzezi answered, and for the first time Audrey noticed anger in her eyes.  “That’s what happened.”

“Probably authorized by the government,” Marc said.

“Why would they do that?  Maybe the drones were hacked?” Audrey suggested.

Marc shrugged.  “This is possible.”

“But the official report,” Uzezi interjected, “didn’t even mention security drones.  It blamed it on Black Axe shooters.”

“Which is absurd,” Marc shook his head, “Unilag, the University, is Area Boys turf.”

“It’s a lie,” Uzezi said, “I was there.”

“And your friend?”  Audrey asked, looking at Uzezi.

“…she died…”

“That’s horrible!” Audrey exclaimed.

“By the time I arrived,” Marc said, “it was too late.”

“I am so sorry,” Audrey’s eyes were suddenly distant.  Unbidden memories flooded in…memories of her friend, Dano, shot, lying in a pool of blood, her tears, her sobbing, her desperation, Marc working frantically to save his life, Audrey watching in horror as he shoved the plastic barrel of a pen into Dano’s chest, the hiss of air when it finally pierced his collapsed lung, the blood everywhere, on Marc’s hands, on his coat, on her hands, her coat, her hair as she cradled Dano praying he would live.  He did.  Uzezi’s friend didn’t.

For a moment nobody said anything.  Thoughts of life’s fragility, of the arbitrary nature of tragedy, of its absurdity, struck Audrey.  She’d always had a serious case of existentialist angst within her.  Her existentialist angst resonated with the French in Marc.  Hence Camus, the genesis of their relationship.

Uzezi shook her head to free it of the memories.  “I miss her…but let’s not dwell there,” she forced a smile, “let’s get back to what we were talking about, shall we?”  She threw two more cards.  “These are going to be about you, Audrey.”  She turned over the first one.  It was the Queen of Swords.  “You see?  More swords for you, but this time the Queen!”

“From Princess to Queen?  I’m moving up!”

“Maybe, but remember, it’s all about context.  The Princess was with The Lovers and The Magus, meaning you in a relationship.  This time, it is just you.  The Queen of Swords has an intellect as sharp as a cut diamond.”

This was true.  Audrey had always been what her teachers called intellectually gifted, and her classmates called a geek.  By the time she was in grade school she was already hooked on fractals.  Like a haiku that suddenly opens the mind to a hidden truth, fractals immediately resonated within her—there was something about their strangeness and beauty that made sense, that she intuitively understood.  She loved playing with them, discerning the patterns, instinctively sensing how they would unfold, and it amazed her that they could be used to code AI.  But what set her apart from other nerds, geeks and codeJockeys was herserious artistic talent.  She could weave magic.  Her holoTreatments were becoming legendary.

“The Queen is cold and critical, much like the Princess,” Uzezi explained, “but unlike the Princess, the Queen has matured and she demands her intellectual independence.  She has no room in her life for fools, and because of this she can wind up alone and isolated…maybe she’s a bit of a hermit and it’s fine, or maybe she isn’t and she’s lonely.”  Uzezi looked at Audrey for a moment.  “Clearly, you’re not a hermit, not literally, but deep inside…I don’t know…I think deep inside you might be, you might be isolating yourself.”  She turned over the second card, the Ace of Wands.  “Interesting…like Marc, your basic nature is modified by an ace.  His was swords, intellect, which is good because it means he can stand up to the slashing of your swords,” she pointed at the card, “and you are the Queen of Swords modified by the Ace of wands.  Wands are the life force, and the ace is primal.  It means that there is a fire deep inside of you, that a scorching flame burns in your soul.  But remember your previous cards,” Uzezi mused, “Strife, Change, Interference.  Maybe this is starting to come into focus: the fire burns but you are blocked, so the pressure builds…it’s a life force fire, a creative fire, it needs an outlet…and if it doesn’t find one, or if it’s completely blocked, it can lead to self-destructive shit.  There’s a combative side to you, but I don’t think you’re self-destructive.  You are both sharp and reserved, so whatever the outlet for that inner fire is, you know how to channel it and keep it to yourself.”

Fuck!  She’s talking about my hacking, isn’t she?  But how the hell would she know?  Hacking?  Yes, Hacking.  Audrey wasn’t just a nerd with an artistic bent, she was an artPrank hacktivist.  And not just your average artPrank hacktivist.  Not by a long shot.  For starters, she was, or more exactly her avatar Tinkerbell was, a member of BLANK, the notorious outlaw artHacker collective.  But even within the rarefied ranks of BLANK, Tinkerbell had achieved mythic status—she hacked the Amurika is Great flag-waving holographic extravaganza at Mount Rushmore.  Right in the middle of the firework-drenched star-spangled climax huge holo Mickey Mouse ears appeared on the giant stone heads.  It was a comment on the election of Walt Disney Inc. to POTUS—the first time ever a corp won (SCOTUS had, after all, declared that corporations had the same rights as individuals).  Tinkerbell’s BLANKprank made headlines—she was the top story for a three-day news cycle—and she made it to the NETpolice’s most wanted list.  Well, the BLANKprank did, not Tinkerbell, because nobody knew who was responsible.  This is because Audrey was good, very good.  Her digital tracks were untraceable. The NETpolice threw the best AI searchBots at the hack’s trail but Tinkerbell had left no dust.  Not even an electroWizard could follow her trail.  And on top of that, nobody knew Tinkerbell was Audrey.  So how could Uzezi possibly know?  What was she hinting at?

Uzezi picked up the cards and shuffled.  She looked at Audrey inquisitively, waiting to see if she would react.  Audrey didn’t.  Her face remained card-shark enigmatic.

…or maybe it’s not that, maybe she isn’t talking about Tinkerbell at all, maybe the blocked fire, the strife, these things are about…Audrey turned a whiter shade of pale…my rape?  But how the hell would Uzezi know?  Marc couldn’t have told her—hedoesn’t know.  Even Audrey’s parents didn’t know that she’d been raped when she was thirteen.  How could little pieces of cardboard hack her darkest secret?

Marc scratched his sandpaper chin.  For him, having been kept in the dark by Audrey, Uzezi’s assessment wasn’t computing.  Sure, he knew Audrey was good at digital, he knew she could do basic hacks into basic websites, but he knew nothing of Tinkerbell, BLANK, or artPranks.  This does not resemble Audrey; this is more like Uzezi. It is she who is full of secrets.   Clearly Marc knew Uzezi way better than he knew Audrey.  “Maybe this is more about you than Audrey,” he said, “it is you always being involved in clandestine radical political intrigues, non?  Is it possible you are projecting?”

“Yes, Marc, you know me too well, but I don’t think I’m projecting—am I projecting, Audrey?”

Uzezi again waited for Audrey to react.  Audrey still said nothing and tried hard to sustain card-shark enigmatic.

“Audrey, I think that the two of us have much in common,” Uzezi said, “and you, Marc, have a taste for troublemaking women.”  Uzezi leaned in toward Audrey.  “He used to call me Tanya the Revolutionary.”

What!?  Tanya the Revolutionary!?  Carnaby Street Modgrrrl?  Really?  “So why did you and Marc break up?” Audrey asked, her curiosity aroused.

Marc pointed at Uzezi.  “This is because she was running around with dangerous people…”

“Yes, I suppose I was, but they weren’t that dangerous…we were idealists.”

“Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power,” Marc pointed out.

“Oh Marc, this is another of your quotes, isn’t it?”

“Oui, Bertrand Russel.  But I’m not saying it is you the quote is about, but I think it fits some of your friends.”

“The dangerous people I was running around with?” Uzezi rolled her eyes, “I think we were more along the lines of  ‘I rebel; therefore I exist,’ as your friend Camus said.”

“Well done,” Audrey chuckled, “throwing a Camus at Marc.”

“Yes, it’s not often we grrrls get the chance, is it?” Uzezi winked at Audrey, “but the truth is, my political activities wereupsetting Marc but it was a bit hypocritical of him because he’s an adrenaline junky.  Aren’t you Marc?”

 “It is not a life when you live in fear of the secret police knocking on the door,” Marc elucidated.

“But admit it Marc, you got off on the excitement.”

“I don’t believe in taking foolish risks to prove a point.”

“Marc didn’t commit to the cause.” 

“The cause?”  Audrey was certain she’d never heard any of this.

“Fighting corruption,” Marc clarified, “to which I was most sympathetic. But what can you change if you are dead or in jail?”

“But Marc, you know that taking risks is the only way to change things in my country.  Now, whether or not the risks are foolish, that all depends on your level of commitment.”

“So what were the foolish risks?” Audrey looked with interest at Uzezi.

“We, okay, two of my friends, broke into the office of the FCC, the Financial Crimes Commission.  Well, broke into is maybe an exaggeration.  We are a well-connected bunch and we managed to get the right passkeys.  They walked in and liberated a laptop…”

“Stole a laptop,” Marc pointed out.

“Yes, technically you are correct, Marc, we ‘stole’ a laptop.  But it was for a good cause.  We hoped it would provide evidence of corruption, but we never managed to hack into it.  The next day we threw it into the canal, before anyone could find it on us.  We were paranoid because we were on record as having been there, at the FCC offices.”

“Uzezi and her friends are from the correct families,” Marc said, “so without evidence against them, they were considered above reproach.”

“You don’t need to steal a computer,” Audrey suppressed her sarcasm, “to hack it.”

“But this one was not connected to the net.”

“Even an air-gapped computer,” Audrey pointed out, “has blueTooth.”

“Audrey, we weren’t exactly master hackers. We were all liberal arts students, and we were afraid to trust anyone outside our little group…on the other hand, I’m getting the idea that maybe you know something about…”

Marc butted in and spilled the beans.  “Audrey is not a bad hacker,” he said, “I first discover this when she cancelled my train ticket last Christmas without my knowing it.”

“I didn’t want him to leave,” Audrey said, the hint of a blush washing over her face, “but yeah, I can hack simple things like train tickets, you know, easy scriptKiddie stuff.”  She dropped card-shark enigmatic for what she hoped was self-deprecating humble.  “But that’s about it.”  Audrey’s hacking skills were, of course, way beyond easy scriptKiddie stuff, but Marc had no idea, and she wasn’t about to fess up.  Or admit that Uzezi wasn’t projecting.

The annoying truth was that Uzezi wasn’t projecting.  In fact, she was pretty much on the mark.  Yes, there was a fire deep in Audrey’s soul, a fire fueled by burning anger, by hatred for the asshole who had raped her, but she had long ago learned to keep this to herself.   After her rape she had shut herself in her room, isolated herself from Real, and lost herself cruising the web on her virtual reality eyeVid glasses.  She cruised endlessly, for hours, days, trying to not feel, not to remember.  Her fuck-you-world anger mixed with her intuitive grasp of fractal programming inevitably led to hacking.  First, scriptKiddie 8bit hacks on training-wheels, after that more adventurous stuff, slowly moving toward the deep end, and, eventually, the real thing: deepFreak hardcore.  Then it hit her: it was time for me-too payback in virtual—troll the net for women-hating assholes and digitally go Kill-Bill the Bride all over them.  Screw up their lives.  Defame, vilify, toss mud.  Craploads of mud.  Sure, she made up some of the character assassination shit she tarred them with, but hey, the fuckers deserved it.  She was good at it, it worked, but her burning rage at having been raped still wouldn’t go away.

Audrey glanced from Uzezi to Marc.  Time to change the subject.  Besides, Uzezi’s story was getting interesting.  She wanted to hear more.  “So what happened?” she asked Uzezi, “did you ever get caught?”

“The two friends that had actually walked into the FCC offices were picked up by the police,” Uzezi reflected, “but because they never found the laptop, or any proof that they’d ever had it, and because, like I said, we are all from well-connected families, they eventually let them go. 

“But after that, things started to get out of hand.  Some in our group began to consider violence, convinced the ends justified the means.  I wasn’t sure I agreed with that, but they went ahead and made plans, but before they could actually carry them out, one of those periodic crackdowns by the army occurred.  Four members of our group disappeared, as did some other good friends of mine that had nothing to do with politics, and then my father was arrested…”

“Your father, he was arrested?” Marc looked surprised, “Uzezi, I did not know!”

“That’s because we broke up, and you had already left Lagos without saying good-by.”  Uzezi turned to Audrey, “we didn’t speak for over a year.”

“Was he arrested because of you?”

“I can’t know that, but I don’t think so…I mean, they didn’t take me.  At that point my father was active in the opposition, and when army crackdowns occur, everyone who’s in politics gets arrested.  I’m not sure why they didn’t take me…”

“So is he still in jail?” Marc asked.

“No.  The cold political reality is that the army can’t afford to alienate powerful clans, mine included.  In fact, in the end, they had to make father a minister.

“But,” Uzezi picked up the cards, “since the conversation now seems to be about me, lets be fair.  I’ll put myself under the spotlight.  I’ll pick cards to tell us where I am right now.”  She tossed two and turned them over: The Tower and the Four of Disks.  “Ah, see?  A perfect illustration of my dilemma!  The Tower is the destruction of that which has become fossilized, and, as you can see, the Four of Disks is labeled Power—it means exactly that: power…stability…wealth.  So you see, I’m forever caught between my rebellious tendencies and the wealth and influence of my family.  And it is the Four of Disks that follows The Tower, so it tells me that the outcome is associated with privilege.  Which is why my father was released…”

“Wow, that’s an amazing story!  But what if,” Audrey ventured, “it was the other way around, and The Tower followed the Four of Disks?  Would it be the power of your family that is destroyed, and your father would still be in jail?”

“Yes!” Uzezi exclaimed, “exactly!  You are learning, Audrey, context is everything.  But this whole Tarot enquiry started out being about you two, remember?  So let me tell you what I make out from the cards we’ve looked at.  Both of you are driven strongly enough to want to challenge the world, but in very different ways, for very different reasons.  If you do not strike a balance, the two of you will come into conflict.”

The same conflict that split Marc and Uzezi?  It was dawning on Audrey that she and Uzezi weren’t all that different—smart, strong, privileged, rebellious, artsy.  They just led their lives in different realms—Audrey in SIM, Uzezi in Real.  Did Marc get it?  And the damned thing was, all this had been revealed by the cards, hadn’t it?  Cards that were bullshit little pieces of cardboard. Or maybe it wasn’t the cards at all, maybe it was Uzezi who had the power.  Was she some kind of sorceress and the cards a conduit she used to hack the cosmic illusion Maya?  Was she liquidEcho, just like Audrey, slipping past barriers to get at the truth?

Audrey looked at Marc.  He hadn’t taken his eyes off of her while Uzezi spoke, and his eyes told her they’d be okay.  But she now saw the gap between his idealism and her secrets.  He’s the only one here who doesn’t get this.  And if he didn’t get it, were they fated to also end up just friends in splitsville?  Clearly Marc had a thing for rebellious women, but did he then ditch them for being too rebellious?  That wasn’t reassuring.  On the other hand, if cards didn’t speak to certainty, was the future open?  A panoply of implications shuffled before her.  If she confided in him, if she told him all about BLANK, that she was an electroWizard, a master hacker, that her avatar was the infamous Tinkerbell wanted for that the notorious Mount Rushmore artPrank, well, what then?  Marc, the idealist, what would he think?  Would he push her away for taking ‘foolish risks’?  And on top of that, it wasn’t that Audrey couldn’t trust Marc, she knew she could, but what if he unwittingly mentioned her secret to the wrong person?  Forever having to conceal half her life, this was her curse.  And, if she did fess up, would she have the strength to tell him why she was a hacker?  She hadn’t even told her parents about the rape.   Could she tell Marc?  Free Will was beginning to look like a triangulation of pieces already in place, a square dance of missteps already choreographed.  Her past defined their future.  Could they ever break free?  Damn these cards!