The Crow Procedure

Enoch sighed. “You didn’t.”

“I left LA. You know that. This crazy party the night before. My friend Malinka bought all these slave boys, and we used their hair for napkins. The dragon festival was on that night, and the greens beat the reds. Every promise biomechanics ever made written in dragon letters all over the sky. My friends all wondered, and I wondered a bit, too, that night, why am I moving to Iiyiyuushii?”

“They didn’t know you were Cree?”

Riel laughed at the old-fashioned word. “Out there, the whole idea that you would be tied to a place — it’s absurd to them. It’s like saying that you’re going to marry a building, that you’re going to sign your will over to a rock. I was the only one who cared that I was nehiyawi.”

Riel leaned over to check on the g-drones. They were dripping glacially across the musculature, like streams of grey sand, tearing through the nerve lines and interstitial tissue, and then plopping like concrete jelly onto the tarp below. Everything as it should be.
“And then I arrived at the border. With all my papers. They had proof I’m nehiyawi. Know what they did?”

“What did they do?” Samaritan asked.

“They searched me. They took off all my clothes. They searched me with their fingers.”

“Well, they have to be careful,” Samaritan said. Two of his nephews worked at the border control. “They don’t want any synthetic material…”

“I’m far from disapproving, Professor,” Riel interrupted. “Real fingers. No scanners. They searched my body with their actual hands.”

“So?”