by S. B. Divya
Papa raised a hand. “She’s dead either way, right?”
“We don’t know that, Papa!”
“Back in the seventies,” Oscar said, ignoring Luis, “during the riots, me and my union buddies put ourselves in front of those mech-loaded police. We knew we could die, but the alternative was worse. And we won, didn’t we? Most of us lived, too. Sometimes, for the right causes, you got to risk your life.”
Luis turned his glare on their father. “You don’t get it! We’re not talking about riots or even war. We have juvers, medics, hospitals to take care of people who get hurt. Even back then, you had those.” He thrust his index finger upward. “That station is a giant metal can surrounded by hard vacuum. They push Welga out of an air lock, poof! She’s dead. On Earth, she stands a chance. Off-world, nobody can save her life.”
Welga laid herself on the sofa, as her leg tremors made standing impossible. “Not much of a life anyway, Luis. Right now, we don’t have juvers or medic-bots or antivirals. We’ll all die that way unless we can stop the Machinehood.”
Waves of distortion washed over reality. Her vision went sparkly. Here we go again.
* * *
Welga regained consciousness to a sense of heavy exhaustion. Luis sat on the floor next to the sofa and held her hand. The clatter of dishes came from the kitchen.
“I’ll go,” her brother said.
“What?”
“I’ll go to Chennai with you, get a launch together.” Luis shook his head as if incredulous at himself. “How we’re going to do that with the airports and sub-orbs shut down, I have no idea.”
“We’ll take a boat ride.”
She made it through dinner without another episode, then took her last zip before heading to downtown Phoenix for a dealer. Night had fallen, and she nearly had to tie Luis and Papa down to keep them from coming with her. Even during her deepest cover operations, her family could get her status from the military. This time, they had to wait and hope for the best.
She changed her outfit to a loose tunic over leggings, baggy enough to hide the weapon underneath. The bathroom mirror informed her that her hair and skin looked naturally greasy. Nothing to change there. She glanced at the old makeup-bot on the counter and had a flashback to Briella Jackson’s death. That happened on March 12. It was March 25. How had the world—and her life—fallen apart in less than two weeks?
Oven-hot air greeted Welga when she entered the truck. A fine layer of dust from the short-lived storm coated the outside. She drove into the city, but she didn’t get far. The truck’s headlights drew too much attention. Vigilante forces guarded the better-quality hives and kept trying to approach her.
If she’d been able to change her clothes, she could’ve transformed into a wealthy citizen and left the truck in one of those neighborhoods. Instead, Welga found a side street where she could park it mostly out of sight. The military vehicle could take plenty of physical abuse and wouldn’t start without her physical key, but if someone managed to tow it away, she’d have a long, unpleasant walk home.
She and Luis had been good kids through high school, staying away from the pill-hackers and drug abusers. She hadn’t paid attention to where they liked to hang out. Her grandfather had run a shop in the migrant labor section, an address she knew. Might as well go that way as anywhere else.
She pinched her cheeks until they hurt, then inhaled dust until her cough sounded convincing. Sickness spread quickly without daily prophylactics, and fear of infection was her best defense against aggressive civilians.
The first gang appeared two blocks from the alley. No surprise. They surrounded her, four masked, overgrown teenagers with metal clubs ripped from bots. She bent over, coughed, and spat.
“Please, help me,” she rasped. “I’m sick.” Coughed again and held out a pleading hand. “Lookin’ for juvers.”
The one closest to her outstretched arm stumbled back.
“No one gonna fuck you for a pill,” they said.
Another snorted. “Probably got a new bug. You dead, bitch.”
The others laughed. They continued to joke about her condition as they walked away. Welga kept her crouch and shuffled forward, careful to maintain the appearance of illness.
The majority of buildings she passed stood in darkness, their doors closed and windows boarded. Hives towered with dim light leaking from upper-story windows. The lack of activity—human, swarm, or bot—disconcerted her more than the literal darkness. She steered away from any sound of violence, mostly metal on metal, and toward voices if they weren’t raised. The first four times, they belonged to vigilante guards who left her alone as she gave them a wide berth. The fifth time, she walked past three people, one receiving a blow job, the other waiting their turn. Must be getting closer. Another corner brought her to humanity scattered on the streets.
Homeless people formed dark masses against or inside bots whose rusted condition predated the Machinehood’s attack. Some of them coughed, too. No one paid attention to Welga. Phoenix had fewer itinerants than San Francisco. The heat and dust storms drove them into shelters, and those who couldn’t find one didn’t live long.
Welga moved easily down the center of the street, while murmuring, “Pretties? Joyrides?”
“Hey,” a voice called. “Over here.”
Welga headed toward them, a slender, young person with cropped brown hair and lean muscles along their bare arms.
“You’re new here. Don’t need to whisper. Nobody cares, especially not now. You got cash?”
Welga pulled a microcard from her pocket and flashed the amount at the dealer. “What you got? I need pretties and joyrides.”
Their eyes narrowed. Why would someone like you need zips?
“For my brother,” Welga clarified. “Westside Brown.” The gang had existed two decades ago, in her high school years. Thank Christ for the network blackout, because this dealer looked like they wanted to call someone and check on the affiliation.
After several tense seconds, they shrugged. “Don’t matter to me.” They opened their case, which had its own light.
Welga scanned the pills and spotted half a dozen quads, a good number of duos, and a plethora of juvers. She hadn’t expected the variety and spent longer than she should have deciding what to get.
The dealer snapped the box shut. “You buyin’ or not?”
Welga shook herself as if from a reverie. “Yeah, yeah. All the quads, twelve duos, two antivirals, and two wound wipers.”
The dealer laughed. “You think that card’s gonna buy all those?”
Welga pulled out two more.
“Better,” they said. “You’ll need to double that.”
Welga shook her head. She’d left most of Papa’s cash at the house. They’d need it to pay for their passage on the boat.
“Open your mouth and show me your hand.” The dealer shone a light at Welga. “You look clean enough. The cards and a hand job, that’s my deal.”
The words no way in hell died before they reached Welga’s lips. Whatever it takes. Olafson had said it, and years before, Jack Travis had shown her what it meant, but she wasn’t working under orders now. She could refuse.
What if others had nothing to sell, or asked worse of her?
Welga took a deep breath, looked the dealer in the eyes, and nodded.
They pulled Welga inside a dark, sweltering shop and locked the door. Then they grabbed Welga’s hand, doused it with disinfectant, and pulled down their pants.
“You make me come or the deal’s off.”
In the blackout, no microcams swarmed.
No one could watch. Nothing would hear.
With the energy of her last duo-zip buzzing in her muscles, Welga grabbed the dealer’s balls and yanked. Her knee came up, into their solar plexus. Just enough force to send their diaphragm into spasm. The box of pills flew across the room.
As they lay on the shop floor, gasping for air, she walked to the case.
“You shouldn’t take advantag
e of sick people,” she said.
She took what she needed, kept her microcards, and left them writhing on the floor.
WELGA
24. Humankind cannot expect to compete with intelligent machines forever, and the longer we attempt to do so, the further we drift from actual humanity. Our empathy for each other fades, dulled by the requirement to ignore our natural feelings for the machines in our lives.
—The Machinehood Manifesto, March 20, 2095
Welga resisted the urge to rip off her hand and wiped it on her tunic as she walked back to the truck. She took a quad-zip as soon as she was clear of the dealer’s street. Rage and revulsion provided plenty of saliva to dissolve it. Christ, she could use a drink of water.
What had she done wrong to end up in this mess? For all the years spent being so damn careful to avoid flow, she had ended up almost exactly where Mama had, with a body destroyed by pills that she needed for her work. Maybe the machine rights people had the truth of it: humans couldn’t compete with WAIs and bots and whatever the hell the Machinehood were. They would destroy themselves by trying. Better to give up and let the AIs rule. Maybe the Machinehood’s actions would save humankind from itself. Maybe some elements of humanity didn’t deserve to exist anyway.
Someone interrupted her morose thoughts with a well-timed tackle. Welga landed on her back with her assailant crosswise over her. The quad had kicked in, though, as had her instincts. She rolled with the momentum of their fall and threw the asshole. Two others came at her. She ducked the swing of a metal club and pulled its user off balance. They moved like slow, clumsy children relative to her perception and reaction times. Not trained fighters, just some dumbasses looking for a victim.
She broke loose and ran the remainder of the way to the truck. Stupid to have forgotten her coughing act. Stupider to get lost in thought and ignore her surroundings.
Welga drove home at full speed, uncaring of what she trampled. Anyone out at this time of night needed to get the hell out of her way. Darkness both literal and technological blanketed Phoenix and let the worst of human behavior go unchecked. It hid their misdeeds. Ever-present swarms had meant that someone could be watching, that your actions never went unnoticed. Criminals had to work harder—and in the privacy of their property—but with the stellas down, WAIs abandoned, and bots destroyed, the streets had changed.
Her father’s neighborhood was quieter. Welga parked the truck in the garage. The wind picked up and blew hot, dry air across her skin. Another dust storm was coming. She lifted the hair from her neck to feel the breeze. A rusty tap on the side of the house released lukewarm water. Welga scrubbed her hands with sand, using an infuriated speed from the quad-zip, and rinsed until her skin stung from the abrasions. She made sure to get every molecule of that dealer off her. Then she went inside.
A dim ceiling light showed Papa prone on the sofa, his eyes blinking at her.
He sat up slowly. “Well?”
“Got what I needed.”
“You’re talking fast.”
“Quads.” She made an effort to slow down. “The dual-speed zips don’t do enough anymore.”
Sadness and regret tugged his eyes and mouth downward. She kissed his head as her heart ached.
“Love you, Papa. Sorry I couldn’t fix this.”
“Don’t say it like that. You told us earlier that this lady on the station could help you. Maybe find out what’s wrong and heal you. You’re not dead yet.” He took her hand and stroked it. “Sit down. I have to tell you something.”
She dropped onto the sofa.
“When your mama was near the end, some funders offered her an experimental design. Said it might cure her by mucking with her DNA, changing it so that she didn’t have her problems. But it would also mean no more flow. She’d have to start over, find something else to do with her life.”
Where are you going with this?
“She took a regular flow to check out their design. She didn’t think their idea would work, but she needed to make sure. And that… that’s when her body gave up.” A muscle twitched in Papa’s cheek. “I wonder sometimes, if she’d trusted them, if she hadn’t taken that last one and tried the new stuff, would she be here today? Would you be sick? She’d have spent all her hours figuring out your condition. Maybe she’s up in heaven right now, looking at us and yelling at me for letting you join the service, for letting you put pills in your body.”
“Oh, Papa.” Welga wrapped an arm around him and squeezed gently. “If she’s up there, she knows you couldn’t have stopped me.”
“Ha. You were always stubborn. More than your brother. But I tell you, I’m proud of you right now, for going after these people, for chasing your cure. Don’t give up. Don’t settle, like me. Your mama left this world doing what she loved best. I think she’d be proud of you, too.”
“I promise I’ll keep fighting,” Welga said. “Now go to bed, please. If I live through all this, I don’t want to come back to Earth to find you keeled over from a bad heart, okay? You need to hold on, too, until we get the world working again.”
She helped him up and kissed his scratchy cheek. She turned off the lights, locked the front door, and stopped in front of her mother’s photo screen. The same routine she’d had every night in high school. With two fingers, she touched her lips and then her mother’s face.
As she passed Luis’s room, she stuck her head through the doorway. “I’m likely to crash if we drive back tonight. Be ready to go early, though. We’ll leave at eight.”
* * *
They arrived in San Francisco about ten hours after leaving Phoenix. Ammanuel and Hassan surprised them by opening the door of her and Connor’s apartment.
“I wouldn’t have bet on you going rogue, Ramírez,” Hassan said.
“It’s not safe for you to know too much, boss,” Welga said. “Stay out of this.”
“I’ll take that advice the same as you would.”
Which meant not at all. She couldn’t blame him.
“You can’t do this alone,” Hassan rumbled.
Welga tilted her head at the bedroom, where Luis had gone with Connor. “I’ll have my brother.”
“And he can protect you?”
“I can protect my own damn self.”
“Sure, when you’re conscious. Yeah, your partner told me about your condition. Cargo ships don’t have a reputation for personal safety, and your brother can’t help if you’re knocked out. I want you to take Ammanuel with you to Chennai. They already agreed, and I can put them on a temporary leave of absence from Platinum.”
Welga opened her mouth to argue, but the boss held up his hand.
“Okay,” she said. She had to admit that his reasoning made sense. Luis couldn’t fight to save his life, much less hers.
“We have Chinese food,” Ammanuel said. They moved to reveal a stack of white containers on the kitchen counter. “Troit said it’s tradition.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Though we haven’t done that in a long time.”
Every kitchen in every hotel had the ability to cook American Chinese food. Like pizza and burgers, it had become a global cuisine. She and Connor would always have it on their last night together before she left for a field operation. This time, they shared the meal with Hassan, Ammanuel, and Luis. Connor managed to sit at the table long enough to finish eating, but his hands shook and his shoulders slumped. The injuries and infections had knocked out his strength.
Welga helped him back to bed, then emerged to find the others cleaning up.
“Thank you,” she said quietly to Hassan.
“Don’t worry about Troit,” he said. “He’ll pull through. I’ll check in on him whenever I can.”
“I’m going to miss you, boss.”
“Likewise. And you’re welcome.”
Hassan and Ammanuel said their good-byes, with Ammanuel promising to meet them dockside the next day. Luis sat on the sofa gazing around like a lost child.
“I don’t know what to do with
no stellas,” he said. “Normally I’d be working gigs, but…” He shrugged.
Welga waved at the shelf of heirloom cookbooks she’d collected. “You can read these.”
Her brother grimaced. “I think I’ll try to sleep.”
“Your loss.”
She closed the bedroom door behind her and found Connor already asleep. She stepped into the bathroom and filled the tub. Hot water had returned, though it meant that water rationing had also resumed. She spent most of her monthly allowance. She wouldn’t return for at least that long.
Welga took a duo-zip and slipped into the tub. She had to ration her remaining pills to last until she reached Chennai. Two weeks of travel… a lot could happen in that time. Would India and China take America’s side against Eko-Yi? Would they actively defend their right to launch supplies to the station? Their loyalty to their former colony had kept them from agreeing to a full embargo, but if the US shared their intel, the two countries might be convinced.
The dakini had come from the space station. They’d murdered three funders, killed or injured dozens more during combat, and destroyed billions of coin in property. Those crimes couldn’t go unanswered. What would she find up there? She hadn’t planned on making her first visit to space a dangerous mission, but any confrontation with the Machinehood had the potential to get violent. How many on the station were involved? With barely four hundred residents, keeping secrets couldn’t be easy, even in a place without constant swarms.
The water had cooled to body temperature. Welga toweled off and emerged to find Connor awake. He raised his brows appreciatively at her form and beckoned her to bed.
“You sure you aren’t too tired?” she said.
He shook his head and traced a finger along her neck and shoulder. “Chinese food and sex. It’s our tradition. It would be bad luck to break it.”
They tried to be quiet, and Connor let her do most of the work, but he definitely wasn’t too tired. No cameras. No audience. No tips. She had always thought it would feel less exciting that way. In a way, it did, but their quiet intimacy put her in a state similar to flow—complete concentration on this moment, no distractions, fully engaged with the heat of Connor’s flushed skin, the sound of his hitched breath, the pressure of his fingers digging into her hips.