Bluescreen

by Dan Wells

  “So,” said Anja, stirring her own tea with its oversized straw. “You carrying tonight?”

  “Every night,” said Saif. “You buying?”

  “Buying what?” asked Marisa innocently, simultaneously sending another message to Anja: You’ve got to be kidding me.

  Saif pulled a pair of black thumb drives from the pocket of his shirt. “Bluescreen. You girls try it last night?”

  Sahara’s message popped up in Marisa’s vision: Is that why she brought us here?

  “They didn’t,” said Anja, “because my father freaked out.” The Synestheme turned her voice into a pale pink cloud the same color as her tea, and she winked with an audible ding. “But he’s not here, so pass ’em out.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Marisa, leaning forward. Her own voice came out like a cloud of shifting shapes. “He freaked out because something legitimately freaky happened.” She looked at Saif. “You want to explain that?”

  Saif’s brow furrowed in genuine concern. “What happened?”

  “She started sleepwalking during her trip,” said Sahara. “I’ve got the clip saved if you want to see it.”

  “No, that’s fine,” said Saif. “I’ve . . . I’ve heard of that, but only rarely. It comes from the crash, I think: your brain gives up so much control that sometimes your body just does whatever. It’s not dangerous, though; I mean, it’s just sleepwalking, people do that all the time.” He looked at Anja. “You didn’t break anything, right?”

  “I almost wish I had,” said Anja. “Then they could worry about something real.”

  “We just don’t want anyone to get hurt,” said Marisa.

  “Bluescreen is completely safe,” said Saif, settling into the explanation like it was old, familiar territory. “It’s no different than any other sensory program—like the Synestheme, for example, and you obviously have no problem with that.”

  Marisa frowned and unplugged herself, suppressing a shudder as the real world seemed to solidify around her. The music dulled into the background, seemingly on the edge of her awareness despite its volume. “Synesthemes don’t cause blackouts.”

  “Not as a rule, no,” said Saif, “but they can, like any sensory interface, and when they do it’s completely harmless.”

  Anja grabbed the drives from his hand. “Stop focusing on the blackout,” she said. “The buzz is the whole point. The blackout just means it’s time for another dose.” She dropped one drive in her purse and slipped the other up under her hair and behind her neck, and Marisa thought she could see in the girl’s eyes the exact moment the drive clicked into her headjack. Anja leaned back against the couch, clenching her hands into tight fists, and Saif pulled another pair of drives from his pocket.

  “Care to join her?” He grinned, flashing a brief glimpse of perfect, white teeth between his lips. “On the house. I’ll stay here the whole time you’re out—keep these khotas away from you.” He gestured around at the crowd in the club.

  Marisa looked at the obvious ecstasy on Anja’s face, feeling more than a little envious, but before she could answer, another message from Sahara popped up in her vision: Here comes the Princess.

  Marisa’s eyes went wide, a combination of surprise and disgust, and she managed to recover just before La Princesa stepped into view: Francisca Maldonado, Omar’s only sister and the unbearable, unofficial royalty of El Mirador. She wore a bright white dress that opened at the top like a flower, with unzipped petals of fabric folded down past her shoulders. Marisa thought it made her look like a spoiled banana in a colorless peel. She had long white sleeves that came all the way down into gloves, and the hem of the dress was almost exactly the same length, coming just to her fingertips, with nothing but fishnets on her long legs below. Her face was pretty enough, slender and smooth with proud, arching eyebrows and jet-black eyes, but tinged with such arrogance Marisa could hardly look at her. She was flanked by a pair of pretty yet nameless attendants.

  “Mira, que bárbaras,” said Francisca, eyeing Marisa and Sahara with unveiled scorn. “Playing ‘rich girls’ today, Marisita? Didn’t they tell you at the door? Any clothes you bought on layaway aren’t allowed inside.”

  Marisa fumed, but Sahara looked back coolly. “Is that why you bought your dress at a grocery store?”

  La Princesa was unfazed. “Is this who you’re selling to these days, Saif?” She affected a look of innocent sadness. “I thought you had better taste.”

  “Franca,” said Saif, his voice smooth and diplomatic, “so good to see you. Would you like to join us?”

  “I wish I could,” said La Princesa, “but I can’t imagine I’ll stay long. This used to be such a classy place, but I simply don’t feel safe here anymore.” She glanced out at the dance floor, her eyes settling for a moment on the tight-shirted Mexican boy Marisa had been dancing with earlier. She looked back at Saif with a conspiratorial whisper. “Too much barrio trash.”

  Marisa sent Sahara a message: You think we’ll get kicked out if I knock this girl’s teeth into the back of her skull?

  “I won’t keep you then,” said Saif, his voice unreadably formal. “Bluescreen?”

  “Four,” said Francisca, and smiled seductively. “Five if you’d like to come with us.”

  Keep it subtle, Sahara messaged back. What’s that nickname she hates?

  Marisa suppressed a grin; Francisca’s father called her Pancha, but the girl despised it. Pulling that out here would be the perfect way to put her in her place . . . and then she noticed that La Princesa was watching Saif with obvious interest, her eyes roaming over his body as he reached inside his jodhpuri coat for more Bluescreen drives. The nickname was good, but if this entitled little brat was after Saif, there were much better ways of hurting her. Marisa glanced around, looking for something she could use, and her eyes lit on Saif’s Candy Apple, held out in his right hand while he searched in his pockets with his left. The drink was so close she could practically touch it, and in a sudden fit of courage she did.

  “Let me hold that for you, babe.” She gently plucked the drink from his hand and took a small sip; it caught in her throat like a mouthful of syrup, even thicker and sweeter than she’d imagined, but she hid her hesitation expertly, and swallowed the cloying liquid as if it had cleared her throat refreshingly. “Thanks for stopping by, Pancha, it was great to see you.”

  The dark look that came over Francisca’s face was like a thunderstorm of rage, incensed at the idea that Marisa and Saif were together. Marisa wondered for a moment if she’d gone too far, and La Princesa was about to attack her. Instead Francisca took a calming breath, visibly restraining herself as she prepared what was sure to be a brutal verbal counterattack.

  “Where’s Anja?” asked Sahara suddenly.

  Marisa looked at the couch, but the girl was gone. “What?”

  “She was right here,” said Saif.

  “The door,” said Sahara, her eyes unfocused as she checked something on her djinni. “She’s headed outside.”

  She’s sleepwalking again, thought Marisa, jumping up to follow Sahara as they wove through the pulsing crowd, Saif and Francisca forgotten behind them. She caught a glimpse of Anja’s hair as she disappeared out the door, and ran to catch up. Trancing out in her own home was one thing, but here in the middle of the city there was no telling what kind of danger she could be in. Sahara took the lead, shoving her way through the press of dancers with more fierce authority than Marisa could ever muster, and the two girls burst out onto the sidewalk, looking around wildly. Marisa saw Anja nearly a block away, walking—no, flat-out running—straight toward the entrance to Highway 110.

  “Anja!” shouted Marisa, and tore off her shoes, breaking into a sprint to try to catch her. Sahara kept the same desperate pace beside her. “We’re lucky you noticed she was gone,” Marisa panted. They reached the corner and spared only a tiny glance at the lone oncoming car, trusting its navigation software to avoid them as they bolted past it and across the street. “I thought she was still
passed out.”

  “It wasn’t me,” said Sahara, arms pumping as she ran, “it was someone named FakeJakeHooper.”

  “The movie star?”

  “No, some guy who watches the vidcast. The angle from Cameron’s feed showed her standing up behind us and walking away, and he pinged the chatroom with a comment.” They were gaining on Anja, but only slightly; she’d already turned up onto the slow incline of the freeway on-ramp, and Marisa didn’t think they could reach her before she got to the freeway. “Saif said this never happened! When we get back I’m going to feed that blowhole his own testicles in a sandwich.”

  A car roared past them, headed for the same freeway, and Marisa felt the fear grow thicker in her chest, like a twisted lump of cold iron. Traffic accidents were rare, as the network of self-driving sensors could keep up with almost anything, rerouting at lightning speed around any obstacle, but no system was perfect, and mistakes still happened; it didn’t matter how fast your processor was if your tires couldn’t respond in time. A freeway like this would have thousands of cars, moving at hundreds of miles an hour, and Anja was running straight toward them.

  What was going on?

  Another car roared by, its horn blaring a warning, and then another, and then two more, and suddenly the girls were standing at the top of the on-ramp, the freeway rushing past them like a river of light and steel. Autocars sped by up the ramp, merging seamlessly into the freeway traffic. Marisa searched for Anja, finding her all too easy to spot—she was in a narrow gap in the third lane over, like a rock in a stream, the cars swerving deftly around her. On the street that led to the on-ramp the cars had honked, their onboard computers blaring a warning to anyone who got too close, but here in the freeway there was no such courtesy—the cars were moving too fast, their control programs hurtling them along at two hundred miles an hour. Passenger cars mingled with larger trucks and delivery vans, all barreling down the tightly packed road like bullets through a gun, each vehicle warning the others of the frail, fleshy obstacle in their path, giving them just barely enough time to move around it.

  “She might be safe,” said Sahara, but she sounded completely unconvinced. “The cars can avoid her, and in a couple of minutes the emergency nulis will airlift her right out of the road.”

  “Except she’s moving,” said Marisa, pointing. “She’s running against the traffic, and swerving back and forth between lanes. It’s almost like she’s . . .” Marisa scowled. “Like she’s trying to get hit.” She shook her head. “The cars can’t dodge that forever.”

  Sahara grimaced. “Can’t you . . . hack it, or something?”

  “The entire freeway?”

  “I don’t know! I’m just trying to think of something we can do.”

  “There’s no central AI for the road system,” said Marisa, “it’s a swarm intelligence, like a flock of birds, with all the cars communicating with each other in real time. There’s nothing for me to hack!”

  “Even just one car?” asked Sahara. “It’s better than nothing.”

  Marisa growled in frustration. “Maybe if I had time to study the algorithm they use for collision avoidance I might find a way to . . . nudge it or something. Trying it now I’d be blind—as likely to kill her as anything else.”

  A car missed Anja by inches, and Sahara cringed. “Well, we can’t just stand here doing nothing. Think the swarm can handle two extra bodies to avoid?”

  “If we stick together, we’ll count as one,” said Marisa, and grabbed her hand. She swallowed her fear, and looked into Sahara’s wide, terrified eyes. “Cherry Dogs forever.”

  They ran into the freeway.

  The first lane of cars saw them coming, the swarm intelligence registering their presence and passing it along to the cars behind. Trajectories were calculated and courses were corrected, and the cars moved to avoid the girls before the passengers even knew anyone was there. Marisa ran along the edge of the freeway, trying to catch up to Anja’s position, gripping Sahara’s hand as the giant metal monsters rushed past, buffeting them with wind and noise. She saw each vehicle’s passengers in a strobe-like slide show, smiling and laughing, oblivious to anything out of the ordinary. Their headlights caught the desperate girls, lighting them up in an almost subliminal flicker of leg and face and glittering minidress, but by the time the speeding passengers’ eyes had relayed the information, and their brains had processed the sight and its deadly implications, the cars would already be half a mile down the freeway, restored to their place in the lane and the danger now safely behind them. For Marisa, stuck in the middle, the danger seemed to blot out the entire world, leaving her blind and disoriented.

  “Follow Cameron!” Sahara shouted. “He’s right above her!”

  Marisa blinked open Sahara’s feed. Camilla was inert, still back in the club, but Cameron was hovering unsteadily in the turbulent air above the freeway. Anja was visible only by the disruption she caused in the traffic, but the disruption was still moving, and Marisa took that as a sign that her friend was, for the moment, still alive. Anja had been running so erratically, weaving back and forth among the cars, that they’d almost managed to catch up to her, separated now by just three lanes of speeding traffic.

  Three lanes of high-speed death.

  Marisa took a breath and stepped out into the first lane.

  The swarm algorithm had already started shifting the cars away from the edge of the road, and as Marisa and Sahara walked farther the lane emptied almost instantly, merging those cars with the ones next to them, funneling seven lanes of traffic into six. Marisa gasped, shocked by the sudden space, chilled to the bone by the violent air currents from the hurtling vehicles—the only way to fit the same number of cars through an abruptly smaller space was to increase their speed, and the added movement whipped her hair wildly across her face. The girls bent their knees, bracing themselves against the wind, and walked toward Anja: one step, five steps, pushing the traffic farther to the side, until suddenly the freeway network detected enough empty space behind them and rerouted cars to fill it, trapping them in a narrow tunnel of screaming metal.

  Marisa checked Cameron’s feed, seeing Anja now just one lane away, still weaving chaotically. A massive shipping rig appeared on the feed, and Marisa looked up in terror to see it barreling toward them down the center of the freeway. Anja threw herself in front of it, the swarm network struggled to react in time, and the truck was shunted into the only free space available: Marisa and Sahara’s gap. They screamed and stepped back, turning their heads and trying to make themselves as flat as possible, and the truck roared past mere inches from Marisa’s face, so close it clipped her Jeon prosthetic—only barely, but with enough force that it seemed to rattle her entire skeleton. She froze in place, not daring to open her eyes, but Sahara pulled her forward with a hand on her shoulder. The truck was gone, and they were still alive.

  Anja was one lane away.

  They ran forward, Mari’s cybernetic arm dangling limply, their eyes catching strobed glimpses of Anja between the speeding vehicles. They kept moving forward, and the swarm recalculated again, rerouting another lane of cars; Marisa gasped as the screaming metal river seemed to melt away and reappear behind them. Anja was weaving erratically, apparently still in her trance but occasionally stopping to stare in awe at the sheer speed and power that surrounded her. She started to run again, but Sahara dove forward and grabbed her.

  “Anja! Wake up!”

  Anja’s eyes were blank and unfocused. “They’ve got her,” she said, her voice inexplicably calm, “I’m— Oh, shi—” She collapsed back into unconsciousness, as suddenly as if someone had flipped a switch. Marisa clutched her broken arm and huddled close to her friends, holding as still as they could. When the emergency nulis finally came for them, she sobbed in relief.

  SIX

  “Hello, this is Saif—”

  “Shut up and listen to me, pendejo,” Marisa snarled over the phone line. “You told me Bluescreen was safe—you promised me—and t
hen Anja practically—”

  “Marisa! I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

  “You almost got Anja killed with that stuff!”

  “Is she okay?” asked Saif. His voice sounding concerned. “After you left the club—”

  “After we left the club,” said Marisa, and touched her Jeon arm, probing the dents and ruptures with her fingers. It was completely unresponsive, and she worried that it was broken irreparably. “After we left the club Anja wasn’t just sleepwalking; she was sleepjumping in front of semis on the freeway.”

  “What?”

  “We barely caught her in time, and then spent the next three hours talking to every cop and doctor in the city—and thanks to you I had alcohol in my bloodstream, too, which made those conversations even better than I’d ever imagined. You’re a real gem, you know that?”

  “It was one sip of schnapps—”

  “If you were so damned concerned, why didn’t you come after us?” Marisa was fed up with him, too rich and oblivious to care about anyone but himself—she was fed up with everyone like him, with the whole damn system, and he was going to face the full force of her anger like the stream from a fire hose. “Why weren’t you out there dodging autocars on the 110? What kind of blowhole sits in a nightclub sipping a maldicho Candy Apple while we’re out getting plastadas por las camionetas en la calle?” She was so angry she could barely think in English anymore.